Jaltcoh

Romney's poor choice of words

2012-02-02T01:11:00.001-05:00

Mitt Romney has gotten in trouble for saying: "I’m not concerned about the very poor." That sounds bad, and it was a gaffe for him to phrase it like that.

Here's the fuller statement, from a CNN interview the day after his win in Florida:

I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor — we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans right now who are struggling.

Romney later clarified, speaking to a group of reporters:

You’ve got to take the whole sentence, all right, as opposed to saying, and then change it just a little bit, because then it sounds very different. I’ve said throughout the campaign my focus, my concern, my energy is gonna be devoted to helping middle income people, all right? We have a safety net for the poor in, and if there are holes in it, I will work to repair that. And if there are people that are falling through the cracks I want to fix that. Wealthy people are doing fine. But my focus in the campaign is on middle income people. Of course I’m concerned about all Americans — poor, wealthy, middle class, but the focus of my effort will be on middle income families who I think have been most hurt by the Obama economy.

Romney is right: his comment clearly wasn't intended to mean that he's uncaring toward the poor. What he was saying is that he does care about the poor (he said he cares about "Americans," which includes the poor), but he's relatively satisfied with the amount of assistance the poor already get from existing government programs.

Not only has Romney been saying this throughout the campaign, but Barack Obama in 2008 talked constantly about how his focus was on "the middle class." He even criticized John McCain for not using the phrase "middle class" in a debate. Obama would talk about the middle class without even mentioning the poor. He just assumed that the middle class should be the focus. I don't remember anyone in the media questioning Obama's focus back in 2008. But when Romney makes essentially the same point, while also being explicit about his reasoning in focusing on the middle class rather than the poor, he's depicted as heartless.

IN THE COMMENTS: Rcocean says:

Look, these guys aren't super-human. They're recorded on film/audio talking about all kinds of stuff, 2 or 3 hours a day. Could you talk for 2 hours a day on all kinds of topics, without somebody being able to make look bad? I couldn't.

As I've said before:

There's a vicious circle going on here. The media is ready to pounce on the slightest arguable misstep by candidates or people associated with them. This causes the candidates to be more and more cautious in everything they say and do, which causes them to be more and more phony. This, in turn, causes the media and the public to feel starved for any evidence that the candidates are real, fallible human beings, which causes them to pounce on the candidates' missteps, etc.

Why Newt Gingrich can't win the nomination

2012-02-01T11:35:00.000-05:00

And why the media doesn't want you to realize it.

Cafes of the '50s and '60s

2012-02-01T08:00:00.001-05:00

A quaintly wry mini-documentary on cafes in London's Soho (via Metafilter, where the commenters are translating the narrator's references to British currency):

"Where university students and other assorted eggheads meet to put the world right — or, more often, left!"

The blindingly obvious lesson from Gingrich's devastating loss in Florida

2012-02-01T00:27:00.000-05:00

Rich Lowry writes:

Florida shows why when running for president, you usually need to have a presidential campaign to be successful.

Let's talk about these celebrity yearbook photos.

2012-01-31T07:00:00.000-05:00

Here they are.

The link is from Ann Althouse (my mom), who says:

Fascinating to see those who were always great looking, those who were always bad looking, and — most interestingly — those who looked awful in high school and got much, much better, the most extreme example of which is [George Clooney.]

I'd say the most extreme example is Russell Brand.

A female friend on Facebook says Angelina Jolie is "the most naturally striking" of the bunch — followed, oddly, by Michael Stipe.

I add that Charlize Theron, Dolly Parton, Gwen Stefani, Katy Perry, and Whitney Houston are all in the running for cutest. Great glasses on Charlize Theron.

Conversely, Halle Berry, Pamela Anderson, and Tom Cruise are strikingly plain next to their adult selves.

How is it that Tom Hanks is so unmistakable, when his face is actually very bland? I couldn't name a single distinctive feature of his.

Fascinating contrast between the two Bushes.

Young Bush Senior looks like young Robin Williams, and they both seem like they could have played the dad in Back to the Future (George McFly).

George Michael looks like Maeby on Arrested Development.

James Hetfield looks like a brilliant caricature of himself.

Kurt Cobain looks eerily wholesome.

Blogger of the Day: Megan Ganz, Meeting Notes

2012-01-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

"Often when I sit, my brain keeps running." (via)

(Megan Ganz is a writer for the NBC show Community.)

Who cares how Cynthia Nixon ended up being gay?

2012-01-29T19:11:00.000-05:00

This is a very sensible op-ed from yesterday's New York Times by Frank Bruni, making essentially the same argument I made last year in a blog post called "Is it effective to argue that homosexuality 'isn't a choice'?" As I discuss in that post, Jonah Goldberg also made the same basic point years ago.

Bruni writes:

BORN this way.

That has long been one of the rallying cries of a movement, and sometimes the gist of its argument. Across decades of widespread ostracism, followed by years of patchwork acceptance and, most recently, moments of heady triumph, gay people invoked that phrase to explain why homophobia was unwarranted and discrimination senseless.

Lady Gaga even spun an anthem from it.

But is it the right mantra to cling to? The best tack to take?

Not for the actress Cynthia Nixon, 45, whose comments in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday raised those very questions.

For 15 years, until 2003, she was in a relationship with a man. They had two children together. She then formed a new family with a woman, to whom she’s engaged. And she told The Times’s Alex Witchel that homosexuality for her “is a choice.”

“For many people it’s not,” she conceded, but added that they “don’t get to define my gayness for me.”

This is something to watch out for (and not just as far as sexual orientation): people will claim to be on the side of freedom, equality, fairness, etc., but when you look closer, what they're really trying to do is exercise authority over others. What Cynthia Nixon said must sound like fingernails on a chalkboard to those who think they have the right to set the rules about how her private life is supposed to work.

It's also a tactical blunder to turn the discussion into "Oh, she can't help being gay!" — as if there's something wrong with being gay which can be politely excused. If (as I believe) there's nothing wrong with being gay, then it's of no concern to the general public why someone happens to be gay. (Of course, it may still be of interest to some people, such as psychologists and sociologists, but I don't see how the question has any significance for public policy.)

UPDATE: The New York Times piece may have been mistaken about how Cynthia Nixon describes herself.

2 cellos cross over into rock, and 2 electric guitars cross over into classical

2012-01-27T10:56:00.000-05:00

"Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns 'n' Roses (2Cellos):

"Summer" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons (David Evangelista and Manuel Iradian):

Live-blogging the last Republican presidential debate before the Florida primary

2012-01-26T20:08:00.000-05:00

I'll be live-blogging here. Keep reloading this post (or the homepage) for updates.

You can see my previous live-blogs by clicking on the "live-blog" tag.

For more live-blogging of tonight's debate, I recommend checking out TalkingPointsMemo, National Review, or Althouse (my mom).

As always, I'll write down any quotes in real time, so they might not be verbatim but I'll try to get them as close as possible.

8:07 - A harmonically rich arrangement of the national anthem.

8:08 - Rick Santorum introduces his 93-year-old mother. We see her standing up as the crowd applauds her. Then Santorum says: "I'd better stop there."

8:10 - Santorum is asked what he thinks of Mitt Romney's statement in the last debate that government should nudge illegal immigrants into choosing to "self-deport." Santorum strongly agrees.

8:13 - Newt Gingrich's rebuttal: "I don't think grandmothers and grandfathers will 'self-deport.'"

8:15 - Romney: "I don't think anybody is interested in running around the country and rounding up 11 million Americans — excuse me, illegal immigrants . . ."

8:16 - This is the first time I can remember seeing an exception to what I thought seemed to be a rule:

Is there some rule that every debate needs to bring up immigration, but only near the end? There seems to be some consensus that immigration is so important that it always needs to be debated, but it's unimportant enough to wait till the audience has stopped paying attention.

8:17 - Gingrich points out that if we tried to deport illegal immigrants, they'd "end up in a church, which would give them sanctuary." "We're not gonna walk in there and grab a grandmother out and then kick 'em [sic] out."

8:18 - Gingrich says Romney is the most anti-immigrant candidate in the race. Romney responds very forcefully, taking umbrage at the "highly charged epithet." "I'm not anti-immigrant. My father was born in Mexico. My mother was born in Wales." Gingrich coyly says he'd like to hear what term Romney would like to have applied to himself.

Jonah Goldberg's take on that exchange:

That was Mitt's best counterattack in 10 debates.

8:21 - Romney to Gingrich: "Our problem is not 11 million grandmothers."

8:23 - Romney oddly says: "I think English should be the official language of the United States, as it is." No it isn't.

8:25 - Ana Marie Cox says on Twitter:

Newt: "No one should get trapped in a linguistic situation." Too late for poor Rick Perry...

8:31 - Gingrich: "The contracts I signed with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said I would do 'no consulting.'" And we know that everyone always does what it says in contracts.

8:31 - Romney's response to Gingrich's attack on him for investing in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: "My investments for the past 10 years have not been made by me. They're in a blind trust." Romney gives more details on how these investments are made, and then asks Gingrich if it sounds familiar. An awkward pause, and then Romney points out to Gingrich: "You also have investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac!"

8:37 - Santorum pleads for an end to the personal attacks on Gingrich and Romney: "Can we set aside that Newt Gingrich was a member of Congress and used the skills he gained there to advise companies, and that Mitt Romney is a wealthy guy because he worked hard?"

8:42 - Moderator Wolf Blitzer asks Gingrich about comments he's made criticizing Romney for investing in the Cayman Islands and Swiss banks. Gingrich echoes Santorum, saying we should just talk about "governing the country." Blitzer points out that Gingrich made those attacks just a few days ago. Gingrich glibly says he's not going to talk about it tonight, even though he's "perfectly happy to say that in an interview on a TV show." (Yes, those are Gingrich's words about himself!) Romney: "Wouldn't it be nice if people didn't make accusations somewhere else that they're not willing to make here?" Romney again explains how his investments were made (by an independent trustee, so that Romney wouldn't have any conflicts of interest). Then he launches into a powerful defense of the fact that he's earned his money, invested that money, and realized big returns on his investments. I've been tired of the personal attacks on Romney for a while, so I find him very appealing here.

8:49 - Wolf Blitzer points out that if Ron Paul were elected, he'd be the oldest president ever when inaugurated. Blitzer asks if he'll release his medical records. Paul: "Obviously, because it's about 1 page, if even that long. I'm willing to challenge anyone up here to a 25-mile bike ride in the heat of Texas." He jokingly adds: "You know, there are laws against age discrimination, so if you push this too much, you'd better be careful!" Gingrich chimes in: "He's in great shape."

8:53 - Gingrich is asked how he can be in favor of colonizing the moon and dramatically lowering taxes. Of course, he doesn't explain it. "I'd like to see an American on the moon before the Chinese get there." Why?

8:55 - Santorum smartly calls out Gingrich for his fiscal irresponsibility in calling for lavish new funding of the space program.

8:55 - Paul: "I don't think we should go to the moon. I think we should send some politicians up there sometimes."

8:57 - Gingrich implausibly claims that under his leadership, the space program would suddenly become 90% privatized.

8:58 - Romney says that if he were still working in business and someone made a proposal like Gingrich's space program, he'd say: "You're fired." I'm glad to see that Romney hasn't been cowed by the absurd attacks on him for saying he likes being able to fire people who aren't doing good work.

9:00 - Paul calls out Gingrich for claiming to have balanced the budget, saying the debt skyrocketed by a trillion dollars when Gingrich was Speaker. Gingrich seems to have no disagreement with this!

9:05 - Romney highlights the negative unintended consequences of the tax deductions for employer's health care plans: most Americans get health insurance through their employer, so they stop getting health insurance if they lose their job or even decide to change jobs. I completely agree with Romney that this is a huge problem.

9:09 - Santorum attacks Romney and Gingrich for supporting a mandate to buy health insurance. Gingrich claims that he didn't support a mandate at the federal level. Really?

9:11 - Romney makes his usual move of explaining why Romneycare was a good idea, without being clear on how any of his points are different from Obamacare. Santorum points this out: "What he just said is factually incorrect. Your mandate is no different from Barack Obama's mandate."

9:23 - Wolf Blitzer asks every candidate why his wife would make the best First Lady. Paul says his wife, Carol Paul, wrote a cookbook. Romney describes Ann Romney's battles with multiple sclerosis and cancer. Gingrich rejects the premise that Callista Gingrich would necessarily be the best First Lady, since the other candidates' wives are all fantastic; however, Callista would bring "an artistic flavor." Santorum says his wife, Karen Santorum, was a neonatal intensive care nurse for 9 years. She became interested in the ethical issues raised in that job, so she got a law degree, but she left the legal field to become a mother of 7. She wrote a book on their experience losing a child, and she also wrote a Christianity-based book on manners. [Correction: Santorum didn't explicitly say that the manners book was based on Christianity, though it might have been. Santorum just said it teaches manners "through stories," which is "how Christ taught us."]

9:30 - Romney admits: "I became more conservative when I was governor."

9:34 - Paul is asked what he'd say if President of Cuba Raul Castro called him. "I'd ask what he was calling about!"

9:36 - Nate Silver (on Twitter) makes a good point:

A basic debate skill is looking for opportunities to go on offense when you're losing. Newt seems to lack it, or doesn't know he's losing.

9:40 - Romney and Gingrich give the expected answers on Israel: they'll always side with Israel, and Palestinians need to recognize Israel's right to exist.

9:43 - Here's an issue I didn't expect to come up: should Puerto Rico become a state? Santorum says Puerto Rico should get a plebiscite to voice their opinion on the issue, but Santorum himself takes no position. Wolf Blitzer simplistically says: "I'll take that as a maybe!"

9:47 - The candidates are asked about the role of religion in government. Gingrich talks about what it means to be "truly faithful." Does he really want to pitch himself as the expert in being faithful? Then he launches into his usual hyperbole about how the news media and the courts are "waging a war" against Christianity.

9:49 - Santorum says all constitutional rights come from God, not the state. They can't come from the state, or else "everything can be taken away." "The role of the government is to protect rights that cannot be taken away." I don't buy this mysticism about legal rights.

9:58 - As the debate is wrapping up, National Review's Rich Lowry says:

newt has lost the debate and prob the primary

Bob Dole and other conservatives pile on Gingrich

2012-01-26T17:02:00.000-05:00

Politico reports:

Newt Gingrich better hope voters who lapped up his delicious hits on the “elite media” and liberals don’t read the Drudge Report this morning.

Or the National Review. Or the American Spectator. Or Ann Coulter.

If they do, Gingrich comes off looking like a dangerous, anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud.

It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay says:

He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up.

An anonymous "conservative media leader" says:

All of us who were around and saw how he operated as speaker — there’s no one who’s not appalled by the prospect of what could happen. He thinks he embodies conservatism and if he wakes up one day and has a grandiose thought, he is going to expect all of us to fall in line behind him.

There’s just so much risk on so many levels . . . Everyone’s thinking, ‘It could really happen.’ He could win the presidency if there’s a way to win with 45 percent — a second recession or a third-party candidate.

Bob Dole, who led the Republicans in the Senate while Gingrich was Speaker of the House, released this statement to National Review:

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.

Gingrich served as Speaker from 1995 to 1999 and had trouble within his own party. By 1997 a number of House Republican members wanted to throw him out as Speaker. But he hung on until after the 1998 elections when Newt could read the writing on the wall. His mounting ethics problems caused him to resign in early 1999. . . .

Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall. He loved picking a fight with President Clinton because he knew this would get the attention of the press. This and a myriad of other specifics like shutting down the government helped to topple Gingrich in 1998. . . .

The Democrats are spending millions of dollars running negative ads against Romney as they are hoping that Gingrich will be the nominee which could result in a landslide victory for Obama and a crushing defeat for Republicans from the courthouse to the White House. . . .

In my opinion if we want to avoid a sweeping victory by Obama in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as our standard bearer. He could win because he has the requisite experience in the public and private sectors. He would be a president in whom we could have confidence and he would make us proud.

Dole adds this strange detail:

Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it, and I’m not certain he knew either.

Are there too many debates?

2012-01-26T11:19:00.002-05:00

The Washington Post raises the question of whether there are too many debates in the presidential primaries, writing:

Are Americans getting too much of a good thing?

By the end of the week, there will have been 19 debates among the GOP contenders for president. No other events have played so great a role in turning the party’s normally orderly process of picking a standard-bearer into a roller coaster ride. . . .

Debates were the undoing of two once-promising candidates, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. They made front-runners, however briefly, of two otherwise unlikely ones, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) and former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive Herman Cain.

And without them, former House speaker Newt Gingrich would not have been able to resurrect his dying campaign, not once but twice.

The long season of debates has undoubtedly made the candidates familiar figures to many Americans, offering the willing viewer plenty of opportunity to absorb competing economic plans and various other positions.

One could argue that it has altered the balance of power a bit, shifting it away from the party establishment to an electorate apparently eager to engage: Ratings show the debates are drawing huge audiences.

But some worry that Republicans are putting too much emphasis on how well the candidates perform on a debating stage . . .

[Karl] Rove is concerned that the amount of time that candidates are spending in debates and on preparing for them has taken away from other priorities, such as deepening their messages, broadening their appeal and building their organizations.

Yeah, right: Karl Rove is worried that the candidates are being distracted from deepending their messages. If you watch the documentary about George W. Bush's 2000 campaign, Journeys with George, you'll see that Rove's own boss went around the country spouting the exact same feel-good talking points for two years, and the journalists who had to follow him around felt they were part of a mind-numbing charade. I'm sure most presidential campaigns are the same.

Having a lot of debates forces the candidates to keep up with the issues of the day. It forces them to confront moderators and opponents who can put them on the spot. These are good things. There's very little opportunity cost in preventing the candidates from spending even more time repeating the same stump speech to different crowds.

Is grief a psychiatric disorder?

2012-01-25T15:20:00.002-05:00

Maybe.

Did Obama's State of the Union abandon his focus on income inequality?

2012-01-25T08:42:00.000-05:00

I didn't watch President Obama's speech last night, so I have no comments of my own. But I recommend reading what Mickey Kaus, Matthew Yglesias, and Andrew Sullivan have to say about it.

Here's one of Kaus's points:

In his allegedly table-setting, voice-finding December Kansas manifesto, Obama made a big deal about rising money inequality, citing statistics on the relative growth of the ”average income of the top 1%,” referencing the Occupy movement, etc. There was none of that in Tuesday’s speech. Obama only wants “an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” He didn’t say everyone “gets their fair share.” That’s not money-equalizing populism[.] It’s moderate Republicanism. Looks like Walter Russell Mead was right – [the Kansas speech] was just a ploy to stroke Obama’s left base, quickly abandoned when more Americans were paying attention. Or else it polled as badly as he suspected it would. Sorry, E.J. … (Don’t tell me about the Buffet Rule: Obama pitched his higher top tax rate for “millionaires” as a way to ensure equal sacrifice (as anticipated by W. Galston) not as a way to help reverse the growing income inequality trend.)

Yglesias writes:

Obama pledged to support “every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs,” perhaps making him the only person in America who didn’t read the New York Times story over the weekend about how Apple’s products are all built in Asia.

The right lesson to take from Apple might be that an economic agenda whose “blueprint begins with American manufacturing” is misguided. South Korea, Taiwan, and China all have us beat as builders of electronics. But the world’s leading mobile electronics maker is headquartered in the United States of America and it’s insanely popular. That’s because the greatest value in the electronics business is in the industrial design, the software engineering, the marketing, and the combination of research and intuition that help you figure out what products people will want. Manufacturing, as a statistical category, is more arbitrary than people realize. There’s no inherently greater virtue in putting tuna into a can . . . than in preparing a seared tuna appetizer . . . . If people aspire to remodel kitchens or teach yoga or treat illness or be hair stylists or be chefs or, God forbid, Internet columnists . . . there’s nothing wrong with that.

Why Americans shouldn't feel that bad about Apple outsourcing to China

2012-01-25T00:45:00.001-05:00

In response to the New York Times article on Apple employing Chinese workers to manufacture iPhones and other products, The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn talked to some economists to get their reactions. One of them, Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, had this to say. That whole post is worth reading, but here's his conclusion:

The Times reporters persuaded me that east Asia in general, and China in particular, offer an abundance [of] hard-working people with decent skills willing to accept demanding, poorly paid, and boring jobs. The jobs are acceptable to millions of Chinese, including workers with good technical skills, because the other career alternatives open to them are no better, and possibly much worse, than those in manufacturing. The plain fact is that, for the great majority of 17-to-30 year-old Americans, there are better, or at least less risky, alternatives to a manufacturing career.

Why Gingrich's supposedly brilliant ideas wouldn't work

2012-01-24T09:14:00.001-05:00

Ramesh Ponnuru explains.

Live-blogging the first Republican presidential debate since Gingrich's first win

2012-01-23T20:27:00.002-05:00

I'll be live-blogging here, starting at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time. Keep reloading this post (or the homepage) for updates.

Throughout the debates, Mitt Romney has stayed remarkably positive most of the time. Yet he just started cranking up the negativity against Newt Gingrich — warning of an "October surprise" and calling him "highly erratic." You can bet that the moderators will try to goad Romney into repeating those same attacks when he's standing next to Gingrich.

You can see my previous live-blogs by clicking on the "live-blog" tag.

For more live-blogging of tonight's debate, I recommend checking out TalkingPointsMemo, National Review, or Althouse (my mom).

As always, I'll write down any quotes in real time, so they might not be verbatim but I'll try to get them as close as possible.

9:08 - Romney points out that Gingrich "did resign in disgrace" after 88% of House Republicans voted to reprimand him. "His approval rating was down to 18%. . . . We suffered historic losses."

9:10 - Gingrich's response: "He may have been a good financier, he's a terrible historian." He says the only thing he did wrong was that one of his lawyers wrote one mistaken letter.

9:11 - Gingrich brings up a new attack on Romney, saying that Republicans lost governorships while he was head of the National Governors Association and lost Republicans in the Massachusetts legislature while he was governor. Brian Williams strangely doesn't give Romney an opportunity to respond. I thought the rules say if a candidate's name is mentioned, that candidate always gets to respond.

9:17 - Brian Williams asks Gingrich a ridiculous question: whether he'll shift in his views on foreign policy in order to get Ron Paul's endorsement. Williams seems like he isn't even trying to do a good job of moderating the debate.

9:19 - Romney is asked about what people will see in his tax returns. Romney brushes aside the question, briefly saying there will be no surprises and he's followed the law. "I don't think you want someone as president who pays more taxes than he's required to." But — "I'm proud of the fact that I pay a lot of taxes." Then he pivots: "What I'm really worried about is the taxes of the American people." He'd eliminate taxes on "interest, dividends, and capital gains" for everyone who makes less than $200,000 a year.

9:22 - Gingrich proposes a "Mitt Romney flat tax" — a 15% income tax on everyone. Romney asks if the capital gains tax would be 15%. Gingrich says no, he'd eliminate the capital gains tax for everyone. Romney: "Well, under that plan, I'd have paid no taxes in the last two years." [ADDED: Here's the video.]

9:25 - Brian Williams hasn't done his homework for this debate: he asks Santorum a question about why he has attacked Romney over Bain Capital, and Santorum has to say he hasn't made any of those attacks. Romney agrees.

9:29 - Romney goes after Gingrich on his work for Freddie Mac: "They don't pay historians $25,000 a month for 6 years. That's about $1.6 million. They didn't hire you as a historian. They hired you as a consultant. . . . And you were hired by the chief lobbyist of Freddie Mac. . . . You could have spoken out aggressively. You could have said, 'This is wrong, this needs to stop.' But instead you were being paid by them."

9:35 - My mom says Gingrich "looks tired and badly made up."

9:44 - Brian Williams asks, "What do you do if you find out that Fidel Castro has died?" Romney: "First of all, you'll thank Heavens if Fidel Castro has met his maker." Gingrich says Castro won't "meet his maker" but will go to "another place." So Gingrich seems to think "meet his maker" means "go to Heaven." I thought it just meant "die."

10:04 - The candidates are asked why it's OK for them to run ads in Spanish, yet they want English to be the national language, which would mean the ballots would be only in English. Gingrich says he's happy to cater to any ethnicity in his campaign, but the country should be unified with an official language. Ron Paul says he's in favor of English as the official national language, but the federal government shouldn't stop states from doing whatever they want in other languages.

10:07 - Rich Lowry asks:

why would anyone not professionally obligated still be watching this debate?

10:12 - The moderator points out that Romney gets a lot of donations from sugar companies, and asks what his view is on sugar subsidies. Romney: "My view is we ought to get rid of subsidies and let markets work properly."

10:19 - Santorum is asked why he supported congressional intervention after a judge ruled that Terri Schiavo had been in a vegetative state for years. (Apparently they're bringing this up because it happened in Florida, and Florida is the next primary.) Santorum says he didn't support congressional intervention; he supported intervention by a federal court. So why did he support federal judicial intervention? He says Schiavo's parents happened to be from Pennsylvania, and they talked to Santorum and convinced him that the decision should be reconsidered by a different judge. But how was this Senator Santorum's decision to make?

10:25 - Question: "Why didn't the Bush tax cuts work?" Gingrich says they did work, because after the attacks of September 11, the economy would have gotten even worse if it hadn't been for those tax cuts. So why doesn't he say President Obama's policies have "worked" because if not for them, after the crash of 2008, the economy would have gotten even worse?

10:34 - Brian Williams inexplicably asks Santorum a second question about Romney's record at Bain Capital, after Santorum already made it clear that he hasn't made any of those attacks in his whole campaign! Of course, Santorum refuses to answer the question and uses his time to say whatever he wants. Again, Brian Williams is apparently not even trying tonight.

10:38 - Romney brags that Ted Kennedy "had to take a mortgage out on his house" in order to beat Romney in the 1994 race for the Senate. This is a very mean-spirited attack on someone who recently died, and I wish Romney would drop it. It accentuates the image of Romney as a Machiavellian tycoon.

That's all. That was a lackluster debate all around. I've seen almost every debate in these primaries, and Brian Williams may be the worst moderator I've seen.

Rick Santorum on rape and abortion

2012-01-23T20:27:00.001-05:00

In a TV interview, Santorum defends his support of laws against abortion even in the case of rape. He says:

Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. . . . I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. . . . I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.

I can think of something more horrible than a woman getting pregnant as a result of rape: a woman getting pregnant as a result of rape and then being forced by the government to give birth.

Why focus on the American top 1%, when we could be focusing on the global top 1% or 10%?

2012-01-22T19:37:00.000-05:00

Will Wilkinson subjects the "1%" rhetoric to philosophical scrutiny:

[I]t's hard to see why the American 1% should be especially salient. Why not the global 1%, or the global 10 or 20%, which would include pretty much the whole American population[?] If it is morally imperative to confiscate exceptional wealth and use it to meet human needs, then it is imperative to confiscate most of the wealth in all wealthy countries, not just the wealth of the wealthiest of the wealthy, and transfer it to the world's poor, not to the relatively well-to-do poor of the wealthiest countries.

If it's not possible to bring in $600,000 in a year without therefore being guilty of complicity in a exploitative global system, which invalidates one's moral claim to one's income, it's probably not possible to bring in an untainted, secure $60,000 either.

Of course, most complaints about the American 1% are not grounded on the view that the global political economy is a comprehensive web of exploitation. It's based on the supposition that the domestic 1% is guilty of something or other the domestic 10 or 30 or 50% isn't, and therefore deserves to be a target of scorn in a way the 10 or 30 or 50% does not. But, however you slice it, it's going to be true that a lot of people in the top 1% got there in pretty much the same way a lot of people in the top 30 or 50% got there. If there's nothing wrong with a way of making money at the 50th percentile, there's nothing wrong with it at the 99th. And if there's something wrong with it at the 99th, there's something wrong with at the 50th. The unwillingness to identify specific mechanisms of unjust income acquisition, and the insistence on treating income-earners above a[n] arbitrary cut-off point as a unified class deserving special contempt, strike me as symptoms of intellectually laziness and a less than thoroughgoing interest in justice.

How has Occupy been able to unify without a clear goal?

2012-01-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

An Australian reporter, focusing on one 26-year-old protester named Kanaska Carter, writes:

Kanaska wears a badge that says: “If voting changed anything it would be illegal.” She has never voted. She doesn’t see the point. . . .

Something dawned on me speaking to this group. Political protest is merely the thread that holds them together. It’s about lifestyle.

They missed the chance to turn on, tune in and drop out in the 1960s. They missed the 1970s antiwar movement and, in the 80s and 90s, they didn’t miss much at all.

The turnouts at the various Occupy sites gave them an instant society, an on-the-spot family who would look out for each other. It gave them a chance to become homeless, en masse, without the loneliness or the begging on the streets or the fear of being attacked or having to ride the freight trains south.

“My street family is here with me and they’ve got my back,” says Kanaska. She met this particularly group of three or four blokes about a week ago and they’ve been hanging out since.

They claim they’re liberating America but, really, it’s about liberating themselves.

“I’ve been homeless for a while,” Kanaska says, “on and off for two or three years. It’s a choice. I find it humbles you. I used to have my own apartment and I slowly lost my mind. I was in there with my two cats and I was just like going crazy.

“When I’m homeless I’m always surrounded by friends. There’s freedom without having to pay rent all the time to a system that’s broken, without having to work a nine to five job and being able to do what you’re actually passionate about. I’d rather live playing music, doing artwork and tattooing people.”

On this day, her entire cash reserve is one dollar. “Some days it’s hard to find food but I just put out the guitar case,” she says.

Obama sings

2012-01-20T18:37:00.001-05:00

I didn't even realize that the president was in my town, but yesterday, at a fundraiser in New York City, Obama paid tribute to Al Green (who was in attendance) by singing a line from "Let's Stay Together":

PREVIOUSLY: Obama does things with his voice.

Why has Romney been deemed the presumptive nominee when Gingrich is ahead in South Carolina?

2012-01-20T10:57:00.001-05:00

The New Republic's Walter Shapiro gives several explanations. Here's his take on how Iowa has distorted the media's view of the race:

Why have the media hordes been so consistently off-base in handicapping the GOP horserace? Virtually everyone from blonde midday cable TV anchors to polling gurus like Nate Silver (his January 16 blog post was headlined, “National Polls Suggest Romney Is Overwhelming Favorite for G.O.P. Nomination”) bought into the Mitt-placed confidence in Romney’s inevitability. . . . Romney remains the favorite for the nomination, but it is not likely to be the quickee January coronation that was forecast just a few days ago.

Part of the explanation for the bum predictions has been a false sense of historical determinism by political reporters who should know better based on Romney’s ersatz Iowa victory. (As recently as Wednesday night in Irmo, the candidate was still chortling over his now-vanished 8-vote validation in the caucuses). The coverage coming out of New Hampshire was so tilted towards a Romney cakewalk that the other candidates were consigned to Ron Paul spoiler territory. . . .

Of course, we now know that Rick “We Wuz Robbed” Santorum ended up with 34 more votes in Iowa than Romney. But the idea that Romney or Santorum ever “won” Iowa was always ludicrous. Given the amateur-night vote-counting methods in Iowa combined with the statistical improbability of sorting out an election that close under optimum conditions, it should have been apparent for weeks that Iowa was a tie. But the oddball conventions of political journalism demanded that Iowa crown a winner because even false certainty is required when deadlines loom. (The counting of ballots in the 1988 Democratic caucuses was also a mess—and it is still ambiguous whether the anointed Dick Gephardt actually beat Paul Simon.) The Iowa caucuses should not be equated with the 2000 Florida deadlock since, in that tragic case, someone had to win the state’s electoral votes. But for all their symbolic importance, the formal purpose of the caucuses is to allocate Iowa’s 28 delegates to the GOP Convention. And guess what—Romney and Santorum were always going to be awarded the exact same number of delegates. Only in the phantasmagorical world of media perceptions does it matter which candidate had a tiny edge when the counting stopped.

At Bain Capital, Romney would never have made an investment decision based on the small sample of data from Iowa and New Hampshire. But the press corps made him the prohibitive favorite in both South Carolina and nationally in part because he is running the kind of on-message campaign that political consultants fantasize about. Romney is the perfect paint-by-numbers candidate: He is smart, disciplined, malleable and equipped (counting his personal fortunate and his SuperPAC) with a formidable bankroll. Since most political reporters uncritically accept the governing premises of campaign professionals, how could Mitt go wrong?

Live-blogging the first Republican presidential debate since Rick Perry dropped out

2012-01-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

The last debate until the possibly crucial South Carolina primary. We're now down to just four candidates: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul.

I'll be live-blogging here. Keep reloading this post (or the homepage) for more updates.

For more live-blogging, check out TalkingPointsMemo, National Review, and Althouse (my mom).

~~You should be able to watch it live online, starting at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, on CNN's homepage.~~

8:06 - Santorum gives the first introduction. He thanks Iowa for his victory there, which was just announced today.

8:08 - In Paul's introduction, he points out that he was an OB/GYN for 30 years and is the only veteran on the stage.

8:09 - The first question is to Gingrich, about the interview with his second wife, released today, in which she said he asked her if she would like to be in an open marriage. "I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate with a topic like that." This gets a standing ovation. "To take an ex-wife, and make her an issue two days before a primary, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine." Moderator John King notes that the story came from "another network" (ABC). Gingrich shouts at him: "You chose to start the debate with it! Don't try to blame it on somebody else!" Remember, Gingrich was asked in an earlier debate about marital fidelity, and he forcefully said it is a legitimate issue in a presidential race.

[ADDED: TalkingPointsMemo reports on that whole exchange and gives us the video:]

(As always, I'm writing down these quotes as I hear them, without a transcript or a rewind or pause button, so they might not be verbatim.)

8:14 - Romney is asked about Gingrich's ex-wife. "John, let's get on to the real issues, is all I've got to say." The left-leaning Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic says on Twitter:

So 10 minutes into the debate, I am agreeing with Gingrich and Romney. Gotta stay off the cold medication.

8:17 - Gingrich goes back to his usual adverb salad, calling for us to "fundamentally, radically overhaul" the Army Corps of Engineers.

8:20 - After Gingrich attacks Romney over Bain Capital, Romney says he expects "the left" to attack "capitalism," but "I find it kind of strange, on this stage, to have to explain how private equity and venture capital work and how they're successful and how they create jobs. . . . There's nothing wrong with profit, by the way. . . . It is capitalism and freedom that make America strong."

8:22 - Santorum positions himself to Romney's left: "I believe in capitalism too. Not necessarily high finance, but capitalism that works for the working men and women of this country."

8:36 - Santorum calls Romney's health care reform "a government-run system that was the basis for Obamacare" and "an abject disaster." He acts out how President Obama would predictably criticize Romney in a debate: Obama would say he got his plan from Romney. Romney denies that Romneycare is "government-run." He says Obamacare is worse because it cut Medicare and was 2,000 pages long. Santorum: "You do not draw a distinction that is going to be effective for us [Republicans in the general election]."

8:42 - Santorum to Gingrich on health care: "You supported the primary, core basis of what Obama has put in place." Gingrich brushes off the idea that he'd have trouble in a debate against Obama. Gingrich would tell him: "I was wrong and I figured it out. You were wrong and you didn't." Santorum: "It's not going to be the most attractive thing to say: 'I was wrong for 10 or 12 years.'"

8:51 - John King asks Santorum about Gingrich's recent comment that Santorum should drop out because he "doesn't have any of the knowledge about how to do something of this scale." Santorum has a great response: "Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich. . . . Newt's a great guy and he's my friend, but at times, you just have that worrisome moment that something's going to pop!"

8:53 - Gingrich responds that he spent years working on "a grandiose project known as creating a Republican majority in the House. . . . You're right, I think grandiose thoughts." Santorum has a powerful rebuttal, pointing out that there was "a coup against him" after just 4 years of his tenure as Speaker of the House.

8:55 - We see Romney, with a slight grimace, watching the back-and-forth between Santorum and Gingrich, which has been going on for a very long time. Romney is probably happy to see those two beating each other up. Romney finally gets to speak, and he calls the interchange (in which Gingrich described his congressional experience going back to the 1970s) "a perfect example of why we should send to Washington someone who hasn't been to Washington."

8:58 - Romney takes a gratuitous swipe at Gingrich, saying he read President Reagan's diary, and Romney noticed that Gingrich is mentioned exactly once — just to say Gingrich proposed a bad idea and Reagan dismissed it. Romney oddly adds that Reagan also mentioned Romney's dad (George Romney, who was Governor of Michigan), exactly once.

9:04 - Santorum is asked when he'll release his tax returns. He gives a folksy answer: "I do my own taxes, and they're on my home computer, and I'm not home. So until I get home, nobody can release my taxes. When I get home, I'll release 'em."

9:05 - Romney: "I didn't inherit money from my parents. What I have, I earned."

9:06 - Romney says — and I agree — that "dividing America between 99[%] and 1[%] is dangerous. We are one nation."

9:10 - My mom writes:

I say: "Santorum's on fire." Then: "He is flamboyant."

That's a reference to a comment Santorum made that he's not "flamboyant," implicitly contrasting himself with Gingrich. I agree that Santorum is having a great debate.

9:11 - Gingrich is asked about SOPA. He's against it. "I favor freedom. If a company finds that it has been infringed upon, it has the right to sue." But the federal government shouldn't try to preemptively enforce intellectual property law by taking heavy-handed action against websites that happen to host infringing content.

9:13 - Romney agrees with Gingrich on SOPA: "The law as written is far too intrusive, far too expansive. It would have a depressing effect on one of the fastest growing industries, the internet. . . . I'm standing for freedom."

9:15 - Santorum is also against SOPA, but he doesn't think "anything goes on the internet." Of course, none of the candidates took that position, nor would any reasonable person.

9:21 - The candidates are asked what they would do differently in this campaign if they could do it over. Gingrich wishes he hadn't spent the first 3 months talking to consultants about "how to be a normal candidate," so he could have gotten straight to regaling us with his brilliant ideas.

9:22 - Romney: "I'd have worked to get 25 more votes in Iowa, that's for sure."

9:23 - Santorum: "I wouldn't change a thing. For me to be standing here in the final 4 is about as amazing a thing as I can conceive of happening."

9:28 - Romney says the illegal immigration issue is "not tough." Then why haven't we solved it yet?

9:33 - Santorum tries to make a point (which isn't clear to me) about how Romney has flip-flopped on immigration. Romney responds: "I agree with you. I'm sorry you don't recognize my agreement."

9:37 - Gingrich: "Romney has said he had an experience in a lab and became pro-life. And I accept that." But Gingrich adds that Romneycare isn't pro-life.

9:38 - Romney: "I'm not questioned on character and integrity very often." I like Romney, but it's hard to listen to that with a straight face.

9:42 - Finally, they can unambiguously refer to "Rick."

9:43 - Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum talk about abortion, and then John King says he's going to move on to another issue. The audience collectively roars: "Ron Paul!" King gives in and spontaneously asks Paul about abortion before moving on to the next question.

9:53 - In a dramatic turnaround from how he started out the debate, Gingrich begins his closing remarks by thanking CNN.

The debate is over. Rich Lowry says on Twitter:

if newt wins SC, he'll have juan williams and john king to thank

But Mickey Kaus (also on Twitter) is skeptical:

Not sure Newt has won debate, even if his clip dominates news. Voters seem to pay attention to actual debates this year, not just news recap

Kaus also gives this sharp analysis:

If debate helps Romney it's mainly because Santorum did well, no? Puts anti-Romneyites back in self-defeating split array.

“There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”

2012-01-19T16:47:00.000-05:00

So said the English writer William Somerset Maugham, as quoted by the Washington Post's Alexandra Petri, who has a list of "Things Americans Would Rather Think About Than Newt Gingrich’s Open Marriage."

(However, as long as we are thinking about it, my understanding is that he never had an open marriage. According to his second wife, he asked her for an open marriage, she rejected it, and he cheated on her anyway.)

Rick Perry is dropping out.

2012-01-19T11:13:00.001-05:00

He'll endorse Newt Gingrich.

Now that we've seen the uncannily similar rise and fall of Perry in 2011-2012, Fred Thompson in 2007-2008, and Wesley Clark in 2003-2004, can we finally decide not to get over-excited the next time someone is "drafted" late in the presidential primary race?

It always turns out the same. The only genuine excitement is in the anticipation of the candidate coming in late and shaking things up. Once he actually runs, he seems to be not quite "there" — for the same reason he entered late. If he had a real passion for running for president, he wouldn't have needed to be reluctantly drafted.

An opossum is on a Brooklyn subway, and the New York Times is surprised.

2012-01-19T08:54:00.000-05:00

An article in the New York Times from earlier this week says:

Last Friday — yes, it happened to be the 13th — the straphangers on a late-night D train were startled to discover that a nonhuman creature was in their midst. An opossum, to be precise.

The intrepid marsupial, which had apparently boarded after the train departed from its Coney Island terminus, had curled up beneath a seat, comfortably close to a radiator, as the train rattled through the wilds of Brooklyn.

There were several reasons this was rather strange.

For one thing, opossums tend to like trees. They are not big burrowers, although they have been known to venture below ground in search of food or warmth. And unlike rats or pigeons (often seen on A trains in the Rockaways), they do not commonly carouse within the city’s mass transit system. . . .

Neither the Police Department nor New York City Transit keeps statistics on subway animal incursions. But officials from both agencies said that such an occurrence was rare.

“A wild animal? This is the first anybody could remember,” said Charles F. Seaton, a transit authority spokesman, who sounded quite amused by the tale.

Back in 2010, I blogged an article in the New York Post that would seem to explain why we're seeing opossums in unusual places:

The city played possum -- and Brooklyn residents lost.

In a bizarre attempt to outwit Mother Nature, city officials introduced beady-eyed opossums in Brooklyn years ago to scarf down rats running amok in the borough, according to local officials.

Surprise: Operation opossum didn't work.

Not only do wily rats continue to thrive, but the opossums have become their own epidemic, with bands of the conniving creatures sauntering through yards, plundering garbage cans and noshing on fruit trees.

They've even taken up golf, with two sightings of the whiskered marsupials at the Dyker Heights municipal course in the past week, local officials said.

"They are everywhere," said Theresa Scavo, chairwoman for Community Board 15, which represents Sheepshead Bay and surrounding south Brooklyn neighborhoods.

"Didn't any of those brain surgeons realize that the opossums were going to multiply?" . . .

The opossums were set free in local parks and underneath the Coney Island boardwalk, with the theory being they would die off once the rats were gobbled up, said Councilman Domenic Recchia (D-Brooklyn).

Instead, the critters have been populating, spreading to Park Slope and Manhattan. . . .

The critters have a mouth full of 50 sharp teeth, tend to exude a foul odor, and can occasionally contract rabies, said Stuart Mitchell, an entomologist.

Is Mitt Romney winning because he's the "whitest" candidate?

2012-01-19T08:44:00.004-05:00

No.

Live-blogging the Republican presidential debate

2012-01-16T20:00:00.000-05:00

Keep reloading this post (or the homepage) for more updates.

Since Jon Huntsman just dropped out, this debate's lineup will be the smallest of the 2012 race so far: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Ron Paul.

For more live-blogging, try TalkingPointsMemo or National Review.

[UPDATE: The FoxNews video player didn't work for me, so I missed the first half hour of the debate. I finally found a working link here.]

9:36 - Gingrich on the difference between President Obama and the Republican candidates: "We actually think work is good. Saying to someone 'I'll help you if you're willing to help yourself' is good." He calls Obama the "food stamp" president.

9:42 - Paul is challenged on his proposal to dramatically cut military spending. "We're supposed to be conservative: spend less money!"

9:43 - Romney is asked whether he'll release his tax records. He says he's "not opposed" to doing it, but he'll wait till around April because that's what George W. Bush and John McCain did. He's already showing "a lot of exposure" about other things.

9:46 - Romney is asked a second question in a row. This one is about immigration, and he gives his standard answer: everyone needs to follow the law, illegal immigrants need to get to the back of the line, etc. I don't know why they keep asking about immigration in these debates — is there anything left for the candidates to say that they haven't already said in 10 other debates?

9:47 - Santorum cites a study by the Brookings Institution that gives a way to be virtually sure you won't be poor (since only 2% of the people who do these 3 things are poor): (1) get a job; (2) graduate from high school; and (3) get married before you have kids. Easier said than done!

9:53 - Moderator Juan Williams is very loudly booed for asking several questions of Gingrich about whether his comments have been insensitive to blacks — for instance, calling Obama the "food stamp" president (as he did earlier in the debate). Gingrich says that more people have gone on food stamps during the Obama administration than in any other administration. "I know among the politically correct that you're not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable."

10:04 - The moderators don't seem to be enforcing time limits. Paul speaks for a very long time about how we shouldn't have killed Osama bin Laden the way we did.

10:07 - In response to Paul's comments on bin Laden, Gingrich says: "Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear idea about America's enemies: kill them."

10:07 - Paul: "Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: don't do to other nations what we wouldn't want done to us." This gets loudly booed.

10:08 - Romney: "The right thing for bin Laden was the bullet in the head that he received."

(As always, I'm writing down all these quotes live. They might be slightly off, though I'm trying to write them down verbatim.)

10:13 - Perry is asked whether Turkey should be a member of NATO. Perry says we should "have a conversation" about it. He adds that Turkey and all other countries should "go to zero" as far as foreign aid, and then we should "have a conversation" about foreign aid.

10:18 - Romney: "People who join al Qaeda are not entitled to the rights of due process under our legal code." He's confident the government won't abuse its power to indefinitely detain Americans who are suspected of terrorism. Daniel Foster at National Review says (on Twitter):

Romney essentially said he wants a nation of men, not laws, when it comes to indefinite detention.

Similarly, Katrina Trinko (also of National Review) says:

It's like Paul isn't confident the president's character and judgment won't always be exemplary.

10:33 - Romney: "Anyone middle-income should be able to save their money tax-free." I'd like to see how he would implement that principle in a way that wouldn't create a perverse disincentive against making a high income.

10:38 - The moderators seem to have trouble filling up the whole debate with actual content: for the second time in this debate, Romney is asked about his record on gun control. Romney is then asked whether he has been hunting since 2007, when he was ridiculed for saying he hunted "varmints." He says he has, but he admits he isn't much of a hunter.

10:46 - Romney calls the Gingrich Super PAC's ad about Romney's record with Bain Capital "the biggest hoax since Bigfoot." "We all would like to have Super PACs disappear, to tell you the truth." He says the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform has led to an absurd situation where ads are run on behalf of candidates who are legally prohibited from having anything to do with the creation or editing of those ads.

That's all.

Huntsman quits.

2012-01-15T22:27:00.002-05:00

Jon Huntsman is ending his presidential campaign and endorsing Mitt Romney.

So now the question is: will he be Romney's running mate? I have a hard time seeing who else could be a good one. (Several of the contenders who are most often mentioned don't have enough experience to be president: Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley.)

I'd be happy to see Huntsman as the running mate. He has struck me in the debates as a thoroughly accomplished, knowledgeable, and decent human being.

Unfortunately for Huntsman, he has spent the past year demonstrating that his campaigning skills are mediocre at best. So it seems unlikely that Romney would choose him.

Romney is such a clear communicator that it's hard not to grasp the point he's making, whether you agree or disagree with it. Huntsman is the opposite: even if you try to pay attention to him, you're often left wondering what his point was.

Huntsman might be better suited to Secretary of State.

"Are we to believe that if Mitt Romney had simply been a nicer guy, it would have worked out differently?"

2012-01-13T12:04:00.000-05:00

Rich Lowry deflates the attacks on Romney's tenure at the investment firm Bain Capital. He says:

This wasn’t so much “vulture capitalism,” in the words of the always-subtle Rick Perry, as “turnaround capitalism.”

Lowry notes that when Newt Gingrich makes these attacks, he's "speaking with the purity of someone whose own business model depended on being a peculiarly well-compensated historian."

What does sand look like when magnified over 250 times?

2012-01-10T10:34:00.001-05:00

"It is incredible to think when you are walking on the beach you are standing on these tiny treasures."

Tyler Cowen explains the problem with stories

2012-01-09T15:58:00.000-05:00

"What are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell? Start telling yourself those, and see if your incentives change."

(Here's the transcript.)

Tonight's Republican presidential debate

2012-01-07T17:18:00.001-05:00

I won't be able to live-blog tonight's debate, or tomorrow morning's. Feel free to post any of your reactions in the comments.

Tonight's debate starts at 9:00 Eastern. I assume you'll be able to watch it live online on the ABC News website. There's also a debate tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m.

Newt Gingrich's "timid" anti-Romney ad

2012-01-05T21:40:00.005-05:00

The Washington Post reports:

The former House speaker launched a TV ad Thursday in New Hampshire and South Carolina, the first in which he challenges Romney.

“Romney’s economic plan? Timid,” the spot says. “Parts of it virtually identical to Obama’s failed policy. Timid won’t create jobs and timid certainly won’t defeat Barack Obama.

The ad highlights Gingrich’s “bold leadership” and says: “The Gingrich jobs plan: A powerful plan for growing our economy and creating new jobs.”

The ad uses the word "timid" three times. Even when you'd expect to see the noun form — "timidity" — the ad still uses the adjective "timid" as if it were a noun. So, Gingrich clearly decided that "timid" is a word that could stick to Mitt Romney.

It seems like the creators of the ad decided to play around with the name "Mitt," so they flipped it over to get "tiM," flopped it back so it's "Mitt" again, then put them side by side to get "tiM-Mitt," which sounds like "timid."

Aside from whatever substance their might be to Gingrich's disagreements with Romney's economic policy, the undertone to this ad is that we're supposed to view Romney as too cautious, too restrained, too afraid to do the kinds of huge things Gingrich likes to do. Whether that will convince voters that Romney is the less conservative candidate, I'm not sure.

Personally (though I can't claim to be representative of voters in the Republican primaries), I like the idea of a candidate who's cautious and sensible, not prone to making rash decisions. I might even care about this more than any conventional distinction of left vs. right.

A prediction about the 2012 presidential race

2012-01-05T09:13:00.000-05:00

This is going to be the most boring election year since 1996.

Nicholas Kristof is waiting for a "moderate" Mitt Romney to come back after the primaries are over.

2012-01-04T23:33:00.000-05:00

Kristof's views on Romney are refreshingly sensible, with a nuance that's been lacking from most left-leaning commentary on Romney (remember back in 2004 when we were supposed to care about "nuance"?):

The Democratic National Committee has already released a slick four-minute video . . . excoriating Romney for his gymnastics:

“Mitt Romney, unparalleled flip-flopper, has proved he is his own toughest opponent on the issues,” the Democrats write on MittvMitt.com, where the video is housed. “The one thing Mitt and Mitt can agree on? That they want to be president — so Romney will say and do whatever it takes to get elected, no matter how contradictory.”

[T]he Democratic claims of constant inconstancy seem exaggerated. The excellent Web site FactCheck.org found that most of the accusations in the Democrats’ video were dubious. Typically, Romney had a fairly complex position, and the Democrats caricatured it to portray a flip that wasn’t there or that was ambiguous. For example, Romney supported a stimulus, but not of the magnitude of Obama’s, so it wasn’t a flip-flop for him to oppose the Obama stimulus.

If we do see, as I expect we will, a reversion in the direction of the Massachusetts Romney, that’s a flip we should celebrate. Until the Republican primaries sucked him into its vortex, he was a pragmatist and policy wonk rather similar to Bill Clinton and President Obama but more conservative. (Clinton described Romney to me as having done “a very good job” in Massachusetts.) Romney was much closer to George H.W. Bush than to George W. Bush.

One reason to expect a re-emergence of the traditional moderate Romney — other than that it will be expedient — is that his advisers incline in that direction.

On the economy, Romney has been advised by the likes of Professor Gregory Mankiw of Harvard and Professor Glenn Hubbard of Columbia. Both are experienced, prominent figures, albeit tending conservative. In foreign affairs, Romney’s advisers have included Richard Williamson, Eric Edelman, Meghan O’Sullivan, Paula Dobriansky, Daniel Senor and Dov Zakheim. These, too, are credible, respected figures.

So, in the coming months, the most interesting political battle may be between Romney and Romney. Now, do we really want a chameleon as a nominee for president? That’s a legitimate question. But I’d much rather have a cynical chameleon than a far-right ideologue who doesn’t require contortions to appeal to Republican primary voters, who says things that Republican candidates have all been saying and, God forbid, actually means it.

So would I.

Santorum surges into an extremely close top 3 in the Iowa caucuses.

2012-01-03T22:22:00.000-05:00

Remember: You heard it here first!

I'm posting this at 10:20 p.m., before the winner has been announced. But it's clear that the top 3 will be Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul (and right now they're in that order). This might be the "closest caucus ever":

The closest caucus historically came in 1996, when Bob Dole finished with 26 percent of the vote, Pat Buchanan 23 percent, and Lamar Alexander with 18 percent. The 8-point gap separating Mr. Dole and Mr. Alexander may wind up being much larger than the margin separating the top three candidates tonight.

How Mitt Romney could lose the nomination

2012-01-02T11:34:00.000-05:00

Mickey Kaus explains:

"What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"

2011-12-31T10:57:00.001-05:00

By Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt:

The 12 most overlooked stories of 2011

2011-12-29T11:14:00.000-05:00

The New Republic lists the year's "most overlooked stories," one of which is "Obama’s Failed Fireside Chat."

Historians may someday recall that on July 25, 2011, the bulk of the American people stopped listening to Obama when he spoke about the economy.

31 unanswered questions

2011-12-22T11:18:00.000-05:00

Slate lists 31 questions submitted by readers to The Explainer that still haven't been answered.

My favorite:

17. Why don't they ever use “presents” in advertisements? It’s always about “gift”-giving, and “gift” ideas, never a “they'll love these as presents.”

IN THE COMMENTS: My mom, Ann Althouse, answers that question:

"Gifts' is clearly the better word. Lots of crisp consonants. One short vowel.

"Presents" has a near homophone: "presence." So it can be confusing. It also has other meanings. And if people are reading the ad, their brain might pronounce it "pree-ZENTS" and that would make it hard to construct the meaning.

"Gift" also has much nicer connotations. I think of "gift of God" and a "gifted artist." There's something exalted and in touch with the divine.

The first same-sex first kiss at Navy homecoming

2011-12-21T16:53:00.001-05:00

“This is the first time we can actually show who we are.”

(Photo by Brian Clark, for The Virginian-Pilot.)

Cat soothes crying baby

2011-12-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Why conservatives shouldn't support Newt Gingrich, and libertarians shouldn't support Ron Paul

2011-12-19T18:54:00.002-05:00

1. The Wall Street Journal, in a piece on Gingrich's unconvincing defense against the attacks over his work for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (see my live-blog of the last debate at "9:31"), perfectly sums up the lack of principle at the core of his candidacy:

The real history lesson here may be what the Freddie episode reveals about Mr. Gingrich's political philosophy. To wit, he has a soft spot for big government when he can use it for his own political ends. He also supported the individual mandate in health care in the 1990s, and we recall when he lobbied us to endorse the prescription drug benefit with only token Medicare reform in 2003. . . .

If Americans elect a Republican in 2012, it will be someone who can make the case for reviving economic growth, but also for restraining and reforming government so it doesn't bankrupt the country. If Americans want more "bold" government experiments, they'll re-elect Barack Obama.

That sentence I put in bold seems like the key to understanding Gingrich's approach to government. And needless to say, anyone who becomes president has many, many opportunities to use government to their own political ends! So I can't understand why conservatives would view him as the serious conservative candidate in this race. Frankly, I can't understand why Republicans would nominate him at all. He's far from the most electable or the most conservative candidate.

2. Libertarian blogger Alex Knepper makes the case against Ron Paul:

Nicholas Kristof on North Korea after Kim Jong-Il

2011-12-18T23:38:00.001-05:00

Posted on Facebook by Kristof:

North Korea is by far the most repressive and totalitarian country I've ever visited; it makes Syria or Burma seem like democracies. In North Korea, homes have a speaker on the wall to wake people up with propaganda in the morning and put them to sleep with it at night. The handicapped are sometimes moved out of the capital so they won't give a bad impression to foreigners. And triplets, considered auspicious, are turned over to the state to raise. And now this nuclear armed country is being handed over to a new leader, presumably Kim Jong-un, still in his 20's. The last transition was a dangerous time, as Kim Jong Il tried to prove his mettle by challenging the world, and this one mayl be as well. Look out.

Christopher Hitchens on North Korea

2011-12-18T23:19:00.000-05:00

"The life of the human being . . . is completely pointless. The concept of liberty or humor or irony or happiness or love doesn't exist. You are there simply as a prop for the state. And though it used to be, as with any slave system, that they would feed you in return for your services, that compact broke down a couple decades ago. Now they don't feed you either."

Kim Jong Il is dead.

2011-12-18T22:55:00.000-05:00

The murderous dictator of North Korea has died at 69 or 70.

A comment in my Facebook feed says this almost makes up for the loss of Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel.

I'm afraid that of the three of them, Kim Jong Il will be the easiest to replace.

Obama's focus on income inequality . . .

2011-12-17T09:56:00.002-05:00

. . . looks like a good way to lose the election.

Christopher Hitchens is dead at 62.

2011-12-16T09:37:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday of pneumonia due to esophageal cancer. (Wikipedia.)

His last published article — an extended refutation of the adage, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" — conveys the agony he was in at the time:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Last year, he wrote:

In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? . . . To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

He wrote about death and the afterlife in his memoir from last year, Hitch-22 (at 337, taken from The Quotable Hitchens, at 85):

I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on — only henceforth in my absence. . . . Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave.

He wrote this about George Orwell (in Why Orwell Matters, at 211, taken from The Quotable Hitchens, at 210-211):

[W]hat he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that "views" do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

Live-blogging the last Republican presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses

2011-12-15T20:08:00.004-05:00

~~I'll be live-blogging here once the debate starts at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time. Keep reloading for more updates.~~

For more live-blogging, I recommend checking TalkingPointsMemo, National Review, and Althouse (my mom).

9:03 - The moderator tells Newt Gingrich: "You're now physically at the center of the stage, which means you're at the top of the polls." That's the first time I've heard them admit that this is how they choose where to place the candidates.

9:04 - Gingrich is asked about electability. He says he'll win against President Obama in "seven three-hour debates." Huh?

9:06 - Ron Paul gets the second question! That must be a first. He's asked if he'll support whoever ends up being the Republican nominee. "Probably anybody up here could beat Obama." I didn't hear him answer the question.

9:07 - Rick Santorum is asked why he's doing so badly when he's spent more time in Iowa than any of the other candidates. "I'm counting on the people of Iowa to catch fire for me." He says he presents a "clear contrast" with the others because he's been a consistent conservative. If that's so clear, yet he's going nowhere, doesn't that imply that hardcore conservatism isn't the voters' top priority?

9:09 - Mitt Romney is asked why he would be better than Gingrich at "making the case" for Republican policies when debating President Obama. This is essentially inviting Romney to attack Gingrich. Romney doesn't take the bait; he strings together a bunch of his talking points that we've heard in past debates, which are all about his positive qualities, not shortcomings with Gingrich.

9:11 - Michele Bachmann: "I spent 50 years as a real person." Has she been a robot for the past 5 years?

9:12 - Moderator to Rick Perry: "You've admitted yourself that you're not a great debater. . . . You'll be going up against Barack Obama, an accomplished debater." Perry: "I'm kinda gettin' so I like these debates. I'm looking forward to debating President Obama, and I'll get there early, and we will get it on." He's much more lively than he's been in some of the past debates. [UPDATE: Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo says:]

Apparently Gov. Perry saved all the energy from the first 57 debates and packed it all into that one answer.

9:14 - Jon Huntsman: "I am the consistent conservative in this race. . . . We are getting screwed as Americans."

As always, I'm writing these quotes down as I hear them (without the use of a transcript or a rewind button), so they might not be verbatim.

9:18 - Romney seems to be self-consciously shifting to the general election, talking about how he repeatedly "found common ground" with the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature in Massachusetts. Gingrich takes a similar tack, invoking "bipartisanship" and talking about the times he "worked things out with Bill Clinton."

9:22 - The moderator says that after the commercial break, they'll talk about something that hasn't been talked about in any of the past debates.

9:27 - Romney is asked about the fact that his business laid a lot of people off. Romney handles this deftly. He says we're getting a preview of the general election, when Obama will ask him the same thing. "I'll tell him, 'How did you handle General Motors when you were running it? You closed down factories. You closed down dealerships.' He'll say: 'We had to do that to save the business.' 'Same with us, Mr. President.'"

9:31 - Paul savagely goes after Gingrich for his lobbying, saying he's been involved in "government-sponsored enterprises" that are dangerously close to "fascism." Gingrich defends government-sponsored enterprises since they do a lot of wonderful things. Bachmann says she's surprised Gingrich is still defending Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Gingrich says Bachmann made "wild allegations" by saying he lobbied for Fannie and Freddie. Bachmann: "You don't need to be within the technical definition of 'lobbyist' to be peddling influence to Washington." [UPDATE: The New Republic's Noam Scheiber thinks Gingrich's defense was so weak it shows he doesn't really want to win:]

[A]nyone who actually wanted to be president and had made $1.6 million lobbying for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would have come up with a better defense of it by this point than Gingrich's two-pronged "government-sponsored entities do lots of good things" and "I was a national figure doing just fine so I couldn't have been a lobbyist" line of attack. Clearly it's more important to Gingrich to insist on his righteousness than to come up with a defense that might sound semi-plausible, even if it had the collateral impact of conceding he did something slightly dodgy. I'm fairly certain that last night's excruciating (for Gingrich supporters) Fannie/Freddie exchange officially doomed him as a candidate. Well, that's not entirely true. I think his candidacy was already doomed, but this made the doomed-ness really hard to deny.

9:39 - Paul says he "never voted for an earmark," but he will accept the earmarks he gets. "When you fill out your taxes, you take the deductions." He says he would be a completely different president from everyone else: he wouldn't try to be powerful.

9:43 - Perry says we should have a "part-time" Congress so that members of Congress would work at other jobs and "live within the laws they pass." Moderator: "They worked 151 days last year. How much more would constitute part time?" Perry says 140 days every other year!

9:47 - Romney is asked what sector of the economy will be the most dominant in the next 10 years. Romney says he has no idea; the market will decide that. He criticizes Obama for trying to pick and choose winners in the economy, especially the energy sector. [CLARIFICATION: I shouldn't have said that Romney said he has no idea. He said there's no need for government officials to figure out the answer to that question, but that if he has to make a prediction, he expects the dominant sectors to be manufacturing, high tech, and energy.]

9:49 - Gingrich calls for an "uprising" to "rebalance the judiciary." He criticizes "law schools" for making courts feel "empowered" to write the law.

9:51 - The topic that hasn't been talked about in any past debate is the judiciary. This is a dull topic; it just prompts everyone to say judges should be restrained and must follow the Constitution.

9:53 - Paul correctly says it would be an "affront to the separation of powers" to follow Gingrich's preposterous proposal to abolish courts that issue rulings that offend him.

9:55 - Romney points out that we already have a check on the courts: if they incorrectly interpret a statute, Congress can amend the statute to clarify what it's supposed to mean. That's an important point, but it's also a way to avoid talking about Gingrich's proposal to stamp out supposedly bad judicial rulings on constitutional interpretation. Romney has a clear strategy tonight: never attack.

9:56 - All the candidates are asked to name their favorite Supreme Court Justices. Santorum: Thomas. Perry: Alito, Roberts, and Thomas. Romney: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Scalia. Gingrich: same as Romney. Paul won't answer, because "they're all good and they're all bad." Bachmann: Scalia. Huntsman: Roberts and Alito.

10:04 - The moderator asks Paul about the fact that he would be running "to the left of President Obama" on Iran. Paul says our current policy encourages countries to acquire nuclear weapons. "What did we do with Libya? We talked them out of having nuclear weapons. And then we killed 'em!" He praises Obama for apparently backing off from sanctions on Iran.

10:07 - Santorum on Iran: "They've been at war with us since 1979." He calls Iran a "radical theocracy" and says they're founded on "martyrdom." "Their objective is to create a calamity. . . . We need to make sure that they do not have a nuclear weapon."

10:11 - Bachmann: "I have never heard a more dangerous answer for American security than the one we just heard from Ron Paul."

10:18 - Hunstman goes way overtime in a rambling answer on foreign policy. Moderator: "OK, 2 dings in that one."

10:21 - Gingrich: "I'm very concerned about not appearing to be zany."

10:33 - Perry: "If I'm President, and I find out that the Justice Department has a program like 'The Fast and the Furious,' and my Attorney General says he didn't know about it, I will have him resign immediately." Santorum agrees.

10:38 - Gingrich sticks with his past comments that he'd give some kind of amnesty to an illegal immigrant who's been here for 25 years and has ties to the community, but puts more emphasis on cracking down on "sanctuary cities" and dropping federal lawsuits against states for excessive immigration enforcement.

10:43 - Romney is asked why he flip-flopped on gay rights, and Romney denies the charge. He says he's always been against discrimination based on sexual orientation . . . and opposed to same-sex marriage.

10:47 - Bachmann attacks Gingrich for missing an "opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood."

10:50 - Gingrich defends himself for supporting Republicans who have supposedly favored partial-birth abortion: "I don't see how you're going to run the country if you're going to go around figuring out who to purge." Too bad he doesn't understand that point when it comes to the courts.

10:52 - Romney: "President Obama has unveiled himself as someone who's not the right person to lead the country." Interesting word choice.

Everyone is gaining in Iowa . . .

2011-12-15T10:17:00.002-05:00

. . . except Newt Gingrich.

"The 25 Most Beautiful College Libraries in the World"

2011-12-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

Here they are.

And #18 has brought back a flood of memories.

Who does Newt Gingrich think is "the greatest president of the 20th Century"?

2011-12-13T15:10:00.002-05:00

"Stop Telling Women To Do Startups"

2011-12-13T09:27:00.000-05:00

That's the headline of this piece, in which Penelope Trunk (whose has founded three startups and often blogs about balancing work and life) argues:

If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at such a huge rate that it’s easier to get into college as a male than a female. And women take that to the bank by earning more than men in their 20s. Women would probably continue out-earning men except that when men and women have kids, women choose to downshift way more often than men do.

Clearly, women have a choice. There are plenty of opportunities out there for women if the women would just continue working in their 30s the same way they did in their 20s. So clearly, women don’t want to. Women are choosing children over startups.

So it seems that women are making decisions for themselves just fine. It’s just that they are not the decisions that men make. This should not surprise anyone. Men and women are different. So what?

On top of that there is evidence that the members of the VC community go out of their way to attract women. Of course, this makes sense. VCs look for underserved markets. Women are likely to address different markets than men, and since there are so few women founders compared to men founders, it’s likely that women are addressing an underserved market. So VCs want to talk to women.

So VCs are definitely giving women a fair shake, it’s just that women don’t pitch. And women are definitely feeling that they can do whatever they want, it’s just that women aren’t choosing to create tech startups. . . .

I have an idea: How about giving some respect to women who grew up in the 1970s, with feminist revolution baby boomer moms, and are still brave enough to say “I don’t want to work full time. I can work full time. But I don’t want to.“

The whole thing is worth reading. Of course, the real point is much broader than just startups and venture capital.

Tonight's Republican presidential debate

2011-12-10T13:43:00.001-05:00

I won't be able to live-blog tonight's debate. I'll update this post if I have anything to say when I watch the debate later.

I recommend checking TalkingPointsMemo, National Review, and Althouse (my mom) for live-blogging.

You should be able to watch the debate live online, starting at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time, on ABC News.

Why does Obama think ATMs take jobs away from bank tellers?

2011-12-08T13:20:00.001-05:00

President Obama said in his recent speech in Kansas:

Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world. And many of you know firsthand the painful disruptions this has caused for a lot of Americans. . . .

If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the internet. Today, even higher-skilled jobs like accountants and middle management can be outsourced to countries like China and India. And if you’re someone whose job can be done cheaper by a computer or someone in another country, you don’t have a lot of leverage with your employer when it comes to asking for better wages and benefits — especially since fewer Americans today are part of a union.

Now, . . . there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. . . .

It’s a simple theory – one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.

If you're going to make such a stark claim and phrase it in pragmatic terms of what has "worked," you should at least make sure the facts are on your side with respect to your own specific examples. But Matthew Yglesias disproves Obama's claim about ATMs replacing bank tellers with one simple chart (from this site):

Yglesias explains:

[I]t's true that since the recession started, we've seen fewer people on the job as tellers. But that's not a decades-long technologically induced trend. It's a recession. The [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics] continues to project long-term growth in the number of bank tellers presumably because banks like to open branches to attract deposits. It's true that bank tellers as a share of the labor force should shrink but that's different. Banks are doing more with a little bit more, not doing more with less.

The relatively trivial point is: why didn't Obama have anyone fact-check his speech?

More importantly, this exemplifies Obama's attachment to left-wing ideology. He has faith that technological progress destroys jobs, so it doesn't matter what the statistics say. If you believe that advances in technology are actually setbacks to society, then it's easy to believe that the whole idea of an efficient free market doesn't make sense. That is a hugely consequential error about economics for the president to be making, and it goes far beyond whether he knows the right statistics about bank tellers and ATMs.

What are liberals' and conservatives' favorite TV shows?

2011-12-07T13:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a survey of liberal Democrats' and conservative Republicans' favorite TV shows. (via) Liberals prefer Letterman and Conan; conservatives prefer Leno.

Entertainment Weekly's headline says:

Lefties want comedy, right wingers like work

That leaves out the fact that liberals like sitcoms about work: The Office, Parks and Recreation, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Mickey Kaus picks apart President Obama's call for "American business leaders to understand that their obligations don’t just end with their shareholders."

2011-12-07T08:12:00.001-05:00

Here's what Obama said in his recent speech in Kansas:

[R]ebuilding this economy based on fair play, a fair shot, and a fair share will require all of us to see the stake we have in each other’s success. And it will require all of us to take some responsibility to that success. . . .

[I]t will require American business leaders to understand that their obligations don’t just end with their shareholders. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel put it best: “There’s another obligation I feel personally,” he said, “given that everything I’ve achieved in my career and a lot of what Intel has achieved…were made possible by a climate of democracy, an economic climate and investment climate provided by…the United States.”

This broader obligation can take different forms. At a time when the cost of hiring workers in China is rising rapidly, it should mean more CEOs deciding that it’s time to bring jobs back to the United States – not just because it’s good for business, but because it’s good for the country that made their business and their personal success possible.

Kaus's whole post on that section of Obama's speech is worth reading. He makes several points, but here's the main one:

How likely is this to happen on the scale that is necessary? Something close to zero. It’s one thing to rely on the generosity of rich people when it comes to funding new hospital wings and small magazines. It’s another when it comes to the basic success of the American economy—which (reminder) has been reliably achieved over the centuries because we have relied on sturdy, universal drive of self interest.

Kaus's "(reminder)" is a devastating rebuttal to Obama's economic worldview. Obama doesn't seem to understand how markets can do good through lots of people acting in their self interest, so he feels it must be the obligation either of charitable individuals or benevolent government to make sure the system is "fair." Of course, as Kaus says, charity can be very effective. But the president isn't going to inspire people to be more charitable than they already are. The only way any president can increase the level of charity is through economic policies that cause people to have more money to give away.

Jewish stores attacked in New Jersey

2011-12-06T22:31:00.001-05:00

The attackers seem to be copying Kristallnacht.

The Santorum surge

2011-12-05T17:08:00.001-05:00

It might happen!

The Onion merges with reality

2011-12-04T02:36:00.001-05:00

"Rumors Of Extramarital Affair End Campaign Of Presidential Candidate Who Didn't Know China Has Nuclear Weapons"

Herman Cain drops out.

2011-12-03T14:28:00.001-05:00

With about as much dignity as he could have mustered, given the circumstances:

As of today, with a lot of prayer and soul searching, I am suspending my presidential campaign. I am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distraction, the continued hurt caused on me and my family — not because we are not fighters, not because I'm not a fighter. It's just that when I went through this reassessment of the impact on my family first, the impact on my supporters, . . . as well as the impact on my ability to raise the necessary funds to be competitive, . . . we had to come to this conclusion, that it would be best to suspend this campaign.

Fark.com announces the news with a less dignified but inevitable headline:

Herman Cain suspends campaign to spend more time with your wife

"The House of the Rising Sun" over the years

2011-12-03T09:51:00.001-05:00

Leadbelly, 1944:

Frijid Pink, 1970:

Old computer equipment, 2011:

Ramesh Ponnuru makes the conservative case for Mitt Romney.

2011-12-02T16:54:00.001-05:00

In a long endorsement of Romney in National Review (which endorsed Romney in 2008), Ponnuru argues:

Governor Romney’s political career may not reflect the ideal balance between conviction and calculation. But a presidential primary offers a choice among imperfect alternatives, not embodied ideals. Weighed against the available alternatives, Romney comes out ahead — way ahead — because he is the only one of the primary candidates with a good shot at achieving a prerequisite for advancing a conservative agenda as president: namely, actually becoming president.

Huntsman is highly unlikely to win the nomination because Republican voters divine in him a disdain for them, and return it. The others, even if they got the nomination, would be almost-certain losers in a general election. They are either too out of sync with the electorate, too personally erratic, or both.

Representative Bachmann says that President Obama is certain to lose reelection, so Republicans should feel free to nominate the candidate of their dreams, without regard to electability. The president certainly looks beatable. But writing him off is unwise. His approval numbers are weak but not disastrous, the Republican party remains unpopular, incumbency almost always carries advantages, and the composition of the electorate is likely to be much more Democratic than it was in 2010. If the bottom drops out of the economy, perhaps as a result of Europe’s disorders, then maybe even Gingrich or Perry could win the race. But the stakes are too high for that kind of gamble.

Even if one of them did win the White House, what we have seen of their campaigns suggests that his presidency would be a bumpy ride. In Perry’s case, the problem would be an apparent unfamiliarity with national issues that looks good only in comparison with Herman Cain’s proud ignorance. Gingrich, meanwhile, is a constant reminder that political leaders can have too much, as well as too little, imagination. His recent proposals on immigration are classic Gingrich: innovative-sounding, accompanied by high-tech gadgetry, and wholly absurd. Local community boards will decide which illegal immigrants to expel! We will be “humane,” while denying temporary workers the vote and stripping their children of citizenship!

The last time Gingrich held office, he reached a depth of unpopularity that suggested that the public did not merely disagree with his policies but disliked him as a person. . . .

There is another issue with Gingrich, the broaching of which risks cruelty but cannot be avoided in the cold analysis Republicans have to perform. We don’t know whether Gingrich’s marital history will weigh heavily on voters, but we know it won’t help. The contrast to President Obama’s family will tell against him. Gingrich’s election would represent several firsts. He would be the first president with multiple ex-wives, and the first president with any ex-wives who speak negatively about him on the record. He would bring with him the first first lady who could be labeled a “home wrecker.” . . .

[Romney is] reasonable, articulate — phenomenally articulate, by the standards of recent Republican presidential candidates — and reassuring.

Newt Gingrich says the primaries are effectively over.

2011-12-02T10:53:00.001-05:00

"I don’t have to go around and point out the inconsistencies of people who are not going to be the nominee. They are not going to be the nominee. . . . I’m going to be the nominee. . . . And the guys who attacked each other in the debates up to now, every single one of them have lost ground by attacking. So they should do what they and their consultants want to do. I will focus on being substantive and I will focus on Barack Obama."

Does it make sense for conservatives to complain about almost half of Americans paying no federal income taxes?

2011-12-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

Nope, says National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru.

One especially clever point by Ponnuru, in response to the argument often made by conservatives that "the more people fall off the income-tax rolls, the more will support federal activism":

The story . . . relies on implausible psychological assumptions. It assumes that people who pay payroll taxes but not income taxes make a sharp distinction between the two. But what if they, or many of them, simply think that they have paid taxes? It assumes, further, that immediate circumstances matter more than long-term ones. When conservatives argue for tax cuts for high-income voters, or against tax increases for them, we often point out that some people who are “rich” today will not be in ten years, and vice versa. We argue, further, that high taxes reduce the incentive to work, save, and invest, which presupposes that people can anticipate the taxes they will pay if they gain income. But if they can anticipate future taxes, then the fact that they do not happen to pay income taxes at the moment should not matter.

That point has special relevance for parents who are paying no taxes because of the child tax credit. That credit will not be available to them when their children have become adults. Parents are almost by definition more oriented to the long term, on average, than other voters. They ought to be able to see that their taxes are going to go up when their children grow up, and that if they vote for big government now they will have to pay the bill later. . . .

To seek to raise taxes on poor and middle-class people would be a terrible mistake. The idea is bound to be unpopular. And it would alter the character of conservatism for the worse . . . [by] becom[ing] a creed openly focused on helping one group at the expense of another, a kind of mirror image of egalitarian liberalism.

Newt Gingrich supported an individual mandate to buy health insurance as late as 2005.

2011-11-30T00:28:00.001-05:00

TalkingPointsMemo reports:

Newt Gingrich has attacked Mitt Romney on the issue of the individual health insurance mandate, while chalking up his own past support for the idea as an indiscretion in the 1990’s. But as it turns out, those 1990’s stretch all the way to 2005 — and beyond, to 2008 — when Gingrich gave as passionate an explanation of the mandate idea as any current supporter could ever muster. . . .

At a forum in 2005, alongside then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and former Sen. John Breaux (D-LA), Gingrich explained the tradeoffs that both the right and the left would have to make in health care: For the right, some transfer of wealth is involved in providing health care for the working poor, the disabled, and other groups. And for the left, individuals should still have control over their health care, rather than total government management.

“I mean, I am very opposed to a single-payer system — but I’m actually in favor of a 300 million-payer system. Because one of my conclusions in the last six years, and founding the Center for Health Transformation, and looking at the whole system is, unless you have a hundred percent coverage, you can’t have the right preventive care, and you can’t have a rational system, because the cost-shifts are so irrational, and create second-order problems.”

This led Gingrich to a few conclusions of how to implement such a system: Convert Medicaid into a health insurance voucher system as it applies to the working poor (on the rationale that the creation of food-stamps do not involve the government running its own grocery stores); Create very large risk pools for individuals to purchase insurance (i.e., exchanges); and minimize insurance companies from cherry-picking customers.

I'm interested not just in the fact that Gingrich took these positions, but in the way he argued for them. Even while supporting a supposedly liberal policy, he used self-consciously tough language:

But my point to conservatives is, it’s a model of responsibility. If I see somebody who’s earning over $50,000 a year, who has made the calculated decision not to buy health insurance, I’m looking at somebody who is absolutely as irresponsible as anybody who was ever on welfare. Because what they’ve said is, a) I’m gambling that I won’t get sick, and b) I’m gambling that if I do get sick, I can cheat all my neighbors.

Now when you talk to hospitals, a very significant part of their non-collectables are people who have money, but have calculated that it’s not worth the cost to collect it.

And so I’m actually in favor of finding a way to say, if you’re above whatever — whatever the appropriate income level is, you oughtta have either health insurance, or you oughtta post a bond. But we have no right, we have no right in this society, to have a free-rider approach if you’re well off economically, to say we’ll cheat our neighbors.

You can see him make those remarks starting around 3:45 in this video. He starts out by admitting it might sound "un-conservative," but arguing that it's analogous to welfare reform:

Gingrich's argument is a good example of what I see as the fundamental divide in how liberals and conservatives think of themselves, or at least how they hold themselves out to the public. Liberals present themselves as caring. Conservatives present themselves as tough. I don't know of any other unifying theory that explains why conservatives/Republicans disagree with liberals/Democrats on so many disparate issues — economic, social, foreign policy.

Since Gingrich is committed to his image as a conservative, even if he takes a seemingly liberal or moderate position on health care, he isn't going to frame it as being concerned for those who lack health insurance. It's about cracking down on people who abuse the system. That's how conservatives like to talk, so I'm sure at the time he thought he was making a brilliant point that was consistent with conservatism. But for conservative Republican primary voters who are driven by opposition to Obama's health-care reform, I'm not seeing any reason to choose Gingrich over Romney.

UPDATE: Politico has a similar article:

If Republicans are flocking to Newt Gingrich to get away from Mitt Romney’s health care problems, they could end up with a nominee with … awfully similar health care problems.

Or maybe worse: While Romney signed a state mandate into law, Gingrich once went a step further and advocated a federal one.

How to know if you're intellectually honest

2011-11-27T22:51:00.000-05:00

Paul Graham writes:

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.

Graham doesn't use the phrase "intellectual honesty," but that's what he's getting at. Oddly, there are some people (including Matthew Yglesias) who deny that there's any such thing as "intellectual honesty," unless it's used as a synonym for just plain "honesty." I think that's a big mistake.

Old and new ideas

2011-11-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones."

Ironically, this was said by John Maynard Keynes.

Live-blogging tonight's Republican presidential debate on foreign policy

2011-11-22T19:59:00.001-05:00

[Here's the transcript.]

Keep reloading this page for updates!

8:11 - Wolf Blitzer gives an example of an introduction, saying: "I'm Wolf Blitzer, and yes, that is my real name." Mitt Romney says that "Mitt" is also his real first name. Not according to Wikipedia! [UPDATE: TalkingPointsMemo, which makes a lot of money by posting attack ads against Romney, is running this headline:]

Mitt Romney Flip Flops On His Own Name

8:15 - For the first time, Newt Gingrich goes first. He says he wouldn't "change" the Patriot Act, but would "look at strengthening it."

8:17 - Ron Paul mentions Timothy McVeigh as an example of a terrorist who was dealt with in the criminal justice system. Gingrich says, as if this were a knock-down argument against Ron Paul, "But Timothy McVeigh succeeded!" Is Gingrich suggesting that McVeigh shouldn't have been criminally prosecuted?

8:20 - Jon Huntsman says that Tom Ridge was a "great Secretary of Homeland Security." I don't remember many people saying this at the time.

8:22 - Rick Perry says he would criminalize TSA pat-downs and privatize the TSA.

8:23 - Rick Santorum agrees with Perry. "We should be trying to find bombers, not bombs."

(As always, I'm writing down these quotes on the fly, not using a transcript, so they might not be verbatim.)

8:24 - The moderator asks Santorum what kind of profiling he'd support. Santorum says you should look for "Muslims," as well as "younger males." Ron Paul says: "What about Timothy McVeigh?" That sounds like an example of the kinds of people Santorum wanted to focus on! He was a young man.

8:27 - Herman Cain calls Wolf Blitzer "Blitz." A little later he makes fun of himself for the slip, saying he meant "Wolf." Wolf Blitzer says: "Thank you, Cain!"

8:31 - Michele Bachmann hones her answer from the last foreign-policy debate about why she supports continuing to give aid to Pakistan. She points out that we need to maintain our relationship with Pakistan because they give us intelligence information about terrorism. Perry disagrees, without explaining what he thinks is wrong with Bachmann's reasoning. After Perry says he wouldn't give any financial aid to Pakistan, Bachmann's says that's "highly naive."

8:36 - Romney supports spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan for years to come. "We need to bring them into the 21st century — or the 20th century, for that matter." Huntsman "strongly disagree[s]." There's a very long back-and-forth between Romney and Huntsman, which might be a first in all the debates. Romney emphasizes listening to the generals, whereas Huntsman says you still need to make your own decision as commander-in-chief.

8:41 - Gingrich: "We were told that killing bin Laden in Pakistan brought our relations with Pakistan to a new low. Well, it should have!"

8:48 - There's a bizarrely long lull while they wait for someone in the audience to ask a question.

8:50 - Paul: "Why does Israel need our help? They need us to get out of the way."

8:51 - Paul reveals Israel's open secret, saying they have "200, 300 nuclear missiles."

8:53 - Perry says he would "sanction the Iranian central bank." Doesn't "sanction" as a verb have the opposite meaning from "sanction" as a noun?

8:56 - In response to a question by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Santorum strongly supports humanitarian assistance to Africa in fighting AIDS. He rebukes the candidates who oppose foreign aid (Perry, Gingrich, and Paul).

9:05 - Blitzer asks Gingrich if he would bomb Iran. He says only as a last resort, and only to change the regime.

9:06 - Huntsman is asked if he would support cuts to the defense budget. He says we can't have any "sacred cows" in reducing the debt. "Everything's gotta be on the table. The Defense Department has gotta be on the table." If we can't find any cuts there, "we're not looking hard enough."

9:21 - Adam Sorensen of Time Magazine points out that Cain is "still giving the 'I'll wing it' answer on every question."

9:27 - Paul: "The federal war on drugs has been a failure." Blitzer asks if this means we should legalize all drugs. Paul says he would at least legalize medical marijuana. He adds that prescription drugs are more dangerous than illegal drugs. "And believe me, the kids can still get the drugs."

9:31 - Is there some rule that every debate needs to bring up immigration, but only near the end? There seems to be some consensus that immigration is so important that it always needs to be debated, but it's unimportant enough to wait till the audience has stopped paying attention.

9:34 - Gingrich seems to be doing about half of the talking in this debate. Paul seems to be speaking more than Romney or Perry.

9:41 - Blitzer says we'll have "much more" after a commercial. The debate has been going on for over an hour and a half — I don't know if I can take "much more."

9:54 - Wolf Blitzer asks all the candidates to quickly answer a question about what national-security issue no one is talking about that they wish would be talked about. Santorum says South America. Paul says Afghanistan. Perry says China. Romney agrees with Santorum: South America. Cain: cyber-attacks. Gingrich agrees with Cain and adds: electromagnetic pulse attacks. Bachmann: Iraq. Huntsman: the United States economy.

Now that the debate is mercifully over after 2 whole hours, a couple non-live points:

Perry said that Hezbollah and Hamas have infiltrated Mexico to try to enter the United States:

Josh Marshall at TPM thinks the most important event of the night was Gingrich's comments on immigration. Marshall says:

Newt’s edging into the GOP danger zone here on immigration. He really did say he’d provide a path to legality, though not citizenship, to a substantial number of the current undocumented population. Bachmann called him on it. And he denied he said it. But Bachmann, I think, was right. He did say it.

Now, [that's] an immensely logical thing for Newt to say — that you’re not going to be uprooting and separating families who’ve been here for a quarter century.

But this is toxic in GOP primary politics. It helped sink Rick Perry.

The New York Times seems to agree that that's the big story. The NYT is currently reporting on its homepage:

Newt Gingrich suggests some illegal aliens should be allowed to stay in the United States.

Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review says on Twitter:

Someone should tell Gingrich that some of those immigrants will build mosques.

My mom, Ann Althouse, gives the transcript of the interchange between Gingrich and Bachmann on immigration, and concludes:

That one-on-one really highlighted Gingrich's superior intelligence and sophistication. Clearly, Gingrich has the ability to reach out to many Americans who feel empathy toward the people who are in the county illegally and to take a middle position that balances a large set of interests. I like that, but obviously the red-meat fans have something to complain about. He put some vegetables on their dish.

Mickey Kaus debunks the New York Times article on the "near poor."

2011-11-22T09:03:00.000-05:00

The New York Times ran a prominent article last week on "near poverty":

They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by.

Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called “near poor” and sometimes simply overlooked — and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.

As a commenter on Kaus's blog points out, it's amazing that driving a non-new car is now considered a sign of poverty or anything close to it.

Here are my favorite points by Kaus (with all emphasis in the original):

– “Perhaps the most surprising finding is that 28 percent work full-time, year round.” The Times thinks this 28 percent figure is surprisingly high. (“These estimates defy the stereotypes of low-income families,” says the Census official). Does 28% seem high to you? To me it seems low.

– “Bruce Meyer, an economist at the University of Chicago, warned that the numbers are likely to mask considerable diversity. Some households, especially the elderly, may have considerable savings.” The “near poor” category also includes unemployed 23 year old college graduates from wealthy families, stockbrokers who had a really bad year, moderately paid workers who live in Silicon Valley (where, thanks to the cost-of-living correction, you can make $51,000 and still be “near poor”). Indeed, the vast diversity of the “near poor” category makes it virtually useless. It is a granfalloon, Kurt Vonnegut’s term for a false class of people.

– . . . [A]s society grows richer, you’d think more people would be able to take a year off and live off their assets. Yet they show up as poor—because the poverty numbers measure income, not wealth. (I qualified for the low-income Earned Income Tax Credit once when I owned a house in Georgetown. There was no asset test.) I’m not saying these people are a significant portion of the statistically poor. But they’re probably a growing portion (maybe even the “fastest growing portion,” to use the standard journalistic con that makes the growth of a small population seem significant). . . .

– I’m also suspicious of the way the fancy new poverty measure takes into account regional variations in the cost of living and medical expenses. I live in an expensive part of an expensive region because it is worth it to me. I could live in North Dakota. Does that make me “poor” or have I chosen to consume in one way (nice town) rather than another?

IN THE COMMENTS: Remembering how American "poverty" looked in the Soviet Union.

Why do protesters chant, "This is what democracy looks like"?

2011-11-21T08:00:00.001-05:00

Julian Sanchez has an evolution-based theory:

For most of human history, we’ve spent our whole lives in social clusters of a few hundred people—we’re basically hardwired for groups of that size. That makes it easy to look at a throng of a few thousand out at a rally and tell yourself . . . : “This is what democracy looks like.”

Except, of course, it isn’t really. Or at any rate, it’s only a tiny part of what democracy looks like.

A small group of people self-selected for their commitment to some set of shared goals and values may be able to pick a set of slogans to chant in unison, or resolve their limited disagreements by consensus process. But real democracy in a pluralist society involves deep and often ineradicable disagreement—and not just on the optimal uses of public parks and other commons. It’s true, of course, that concentrated and wealthy interests routinely capture the apparatus of government, and use it to serve ends inimical to the general good. But a frame that sets up an opposition between “the 99%” and “the 1%” —or, if you prefer, between “Washington/media elites” and “Real America”—suggests a vain hope that profound political differences are, at least in some spheres, an illusion manufactured by some small minority. . . .

To imagine protest not as prologue to politics, but as a substitute for it, suggests a denial of the reality of pluralism, and an unwillingness to find out what democracy actually looks like.

Matt Lewis Newt-ly calls out Bill Sher for failing to understand the appeal of Newt Gingrich.

2011-11-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

Here's the post Lewis refers to: "How to talk like Newt (in 7 easy steps)."

I noticed that in the last debate, Gingrich would qualify all his statements with "explicitly." By my count from searching the transcript, he used that word 4 times (and no one else used it at all). It's a way to sound intellectual without necessarily saying anything.

Airlines vs. customers

2011-11-17T19:21:00.000-05:00

2 stories, both from today:

1. Airline makes passengers pay more money to finish flight.

2. Passengers make airline give them more money to leave plane.

The first story reminds me of an episode of The Office where Michael Scott has started his own paper company, and he realizes that he's only been able to make lots of sales because his prices are so low he won't be able to stay in business much longer. We see Michael calling a customer on the phone, saying:

Hi, Jerry. Michael Scott. Well, this is slightly embarrassing. Um, I'm going to have to ask you to pay me a little bit more money for that delivery we dropped off yesterday. [pause] Yeah, we did. We got the check. But we're just going to need a much, much bigger check.

A template for the mental-health industry

2011-11-17T11:23:00.001-05:00

Alex Knepper writes (on Facebook):

You can't be a self-actualized human being while afflicted with crippling boredom. It's affecting millions -- you are not alone. And we know that there are chemicals in the brain that relate to boredom, so, since it's chemically-caused, you can't be held responsible for it. If you want to reverse this disorder, you may benefit from our very expensive drug. Make sure to see an expensive Mental Health Advocate to see how you can pay to get this drug and correct your disease of boredom.

(Previously.)

"Newt Gingrich Speaks Well. But Is He Smart?"

2011-11-15T10:10:00.001-05:00

An excellent question by John McWhorter.

Gingrich is good at taking fairly standard conservative views and dressing them up in academic-sounding verbosity. I don't find that very impressive.

In this video, Glenn Loury and my mom, Ann Althouse, start out talking about Rick Perry's infamous moment of forgetfulness, but then broaden the topic to how much intelligence matters in a president:

The fact that there are many smart people who shouldn't be president is true but beside the point. Intelligence isn't a sufficient condition for being a good president, but it's a necessary condition. In other words, a smart president might be mediocre, but a dumb president isn't going to be good. Another example of a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition: I wouldn't vote for a presidential candidate who can't speak English or who can't read. Still, most literate English-speakers aren't qualified to be president. Here's a theme I plan to return to in a future post: we're observing a job application process, and we (Americans) get to hire someone for the job. Most job requirements aren't guarantees of doing a good job, but they're still requirements.

New York Times: Obama's young volunteers/supporters from 2008 are unenthusiastic about reelection campaign.

2011-11-15T08:08:00.001-05:00

The Times talks to young people in Nevada, which has an unemployment rate of 13.4%. Two of the people quoted:

Jason Tieg, 22, a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho, voted for Mr. Obama with great enthusiasm in 2008. But now, struggling to find a part-time job to help him through school, he is not even sure he would do that again. “I got a job in July as a custodian on campus, but I lost it again when they needed to cut down.”

“I don’t know if I’ll support him next year,” he said. . . .

Maureen Gregory, 23, a Las Vegas native who turned up at an interview at Madhouse Coffee loaded with buttons, T-shirts and posters from the campaign[,] . . . sneaked away from school every day to work at an Obama campaign headquarters [in 2008]. “Sometimes I didn’t get out until midnight,” She [sic] said. She, too, could not imagine devoting that much time to him again, as much as she admires Mr. Obama.

“I didn’t think it was going to be so bad,” she said. “I’m looking for something to do. Even part time. I was definitely hoping Obama could do more.”

Hermain Cain's worst gaffe yet?

2011-11-14T17:49:00.001-05:00

Maybe. There are so many contenders.

Do government regulations "kill jobs"?

2011-11-14T09:03:00.001-05:00

Yes, but they also create jobs:

"If you’re a coal miner in West Virginia, it’s not a great comfort that a bunch of guys in Texas are employed doing natural gas," said Roger Noll, an economics professor at Stanford and co-director of the university’s program on regulatory policy. "Some people identify with the beneficiaries, others identify with those who bear the cost, and no amount of argument is ever going to change their minds."

And to the extent we can trust self-reporting by employers, it seems that not many jobs are killed by regulations:

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that very few layoffs are caused principally by tougher rules.

Whenever a firm lays off workers, the bureau asks executives the biggest reason for the job cuts.

In 2010, 0.3 percent of the people who lost their jobs in layoffs were let go because of “government regulations/intervention.” By comparison, 25 percent were laid off because of a drop in business demand.

Live-blogging the Republican presidential debate on foreign policy

2011-11-12T20:00:00.001-05:00

Keep reloading this post (or the homepage) for updates. You can also find live-blogging on TalkingPointsMemo.

CBS News starts out with a long clip show of some of the most intense lines from previous debates, including the spats between Mitt Romney and the Ricks (Perry/Santorum) about whether Romney would be allowed to finish speaking. So they're shamelessly admitting what everyone knows: that the networks thrive on getting the candidates to attack each other.

8:05 - The first question goes to Herman Cain: what would you do to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? This debate is going to be all foreign policy, in contrast with all the previous debates, which have been mostly about domestic policy. Cain is probably under the most pressure in this debate, since there are so many questions about whether he has any foreign policy competence. Cain is sounding very polished and confident. [UPDATE: As you'll see in some of the commentary I've quoted near the end of this post, my remarks here were not prescient. Overall, Cain's performance in debating foreign policy tonight seems to have been rated very poorly.]

8:06 - Romney says that Iran is President Obama's "greatest failing" in foreign policy.

8:07 - A moderator calls time on Romney in the middle of his sentence, and Romney forcefully says that he still has time left because he sees the yellow light. The moderator says: "I stand corrected." [ADDED: Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo says:]

Mitt stands down [moderator] Scott Pelley as a meta-signal that he can stand down Iran.

8:09 - Newt Gingrich: "There are many ways to be smart on Iran, and relatively few ways to be dumb, and this administration skipped all the ways to be smart." Gingrich makes a point to praise Cain's and Romney's answers on Iran.

8:15 - Santorum, in his answer on Iran policy, pointedly contrasts his own record with President Bush, saying that Bush wasn't willing to spend the money to implement Santorum's policy. Most of the debates have rarely mentioned Bush, but clearly Santorum believes that criticizing Bush is a way to win over Republican voters.

8:18 - Jon Huntsman: "I don't want to be nation-building in Afghanistan, when this nation so desperately needs to be built." He deemphasizes foreign policy as a whole, saying the main issues are the economy and education.

8:24 - Perry says he'll start out by giving "zero" foreign aid to all countries. "Then we can have a conversation" about whether to give any foreign aid to anyone. He strongly opposes foreign aid to Pakistan.

8:25 - I'm pretty sure Romney, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich all got multiple questions before Michele Bachmann got one.

8:26 - Bachmann: "President Obama has been willing to stand with Occupy Wall Street, but he will not stand with Israel. Israel looks at President Obama and they do not see a friend."

8:27 - Gingrich passionately agrees with Perry's answer on foreign aid. He accuses Pakistan of hiding Osama bin Laden.

8:28 - Santorum disagrees with much of what the others have said about Pakistan: "Pakistan must be a friend. . . . We need to continue the aid relationship. The aid is all spent in the United States; it's not sent over there."

8:34 - A moderator asks Gingrich: "Would you care to address Gov. Romney's ability to think outside the box and challenge national-security perspectives?" Gingrich: "No." The moderator points out that he did just that in a recent radio interview. Gingrich: "That's because I was on a radio show. We're having a debate to see who should run against President Obama."

As always, I'm writing down these quotes on the fly and probably won't catch all of them verbatim.

8:39 - Moderator to Perry: "As you said in the last debate, you advocate the elimination of the Department of Energy—" Perry: "Glad you remembered it!" Moderator: "I've had some to think about it." Perry: "Me too!" This, of course, gets a huge laugh. The moderator asks him how we're going to deal with nuclear weapons if we abolish the Department of Energy. Perry doesn't answer the question.

8:41 - Cain: "I do not agree with torture. Period." But he'll defer to the military's definition of torture. The moderator follows up to ask what he thinks about waterboarding. Cain: "I think it is an enhanced interrogation technique." He would bring back waterboarding.

8:42 - Bachmann also supports waterboarding. She says Obama seems to want (?) to lose the war on terror. Bachmann has clearly decided she needs to be as vociferously anti-Obama as possible.

8:42 - Ron Paul: "Torture is illegal . . . by our laws and international laws. Waterboarding is torture. It's illegal under our law and international law. It's also immoral. And it's also very impractical. There's no evidence that you get reliable evidence." [ADDED: Here's the video:]

8:45 - Romney agrees with Obama's policy of killing American citizens who are fighting with anti-American terrorists. The audience boos. Moderator to audience: "We will not have booing."

8:47 - Gingrich makes a powerful statement that the correct action in war is "to kill people who are trying to kill you," not about giving those people due process rights. He emphasizes that this is consistent with "the rule of law," because war is separate from the criminal justice system. His answer draws some vague heckling from the audience. [ADDED: Here's the video:]

8:50 - TPM posts a somewhat comical freeze-frame of Romney at the debate, supposedly watching Perry.

8:52 - After Romney gives his answer to a question on China, Huntsman makes an extremely wonky correction to Romney: "I don't think you can take China to the WTO on currency-related issues." Subtext: Romney is a former governor with no foreign-policy expertise; Huntsman was also a governor, but he's seasoned in foreign policy.

8:56 - Perry is asked whether his policy of bringing all foreign aid down to zero applies to Israel. Perry says yes. "In fact, we oughta do that with some of those agencies that I was trying to think the name of." (Yes, he did say "think the name of.")

9:03 - Josh Marshall writes:

I think we have to face the reality that with Rick Perry remaining lucid and not forgetting where he is, the entertainment value of these debates really goes off a cliff.

9:05 - Paul is asked whether we should invade Syria and try to overthrow the Assad dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, he says no. Moderator: "But what about the 3,500 people dead [in Syria]?" Paul points out that the Soviet Union and China killed "hundreds of millions of people," and we didn't see fit to invade them.

9:08 - Senator Lindsey Graham, who's in the audience, asks a softball question about whether the candidates would maintain Obama's policies about "enhanced interrogation techniques" and trying some of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay in civilian court. Can the candidates say anything other than that they'd reverse Obama's policies? That's exactly what Cain says.

9:13 - Bachmann makes a highly incendiary charge against Ron Paul: that he was against authorizing the military to kill bin Laden. Paul says he supported "going after bin Laden," and was only "upset that it took 10 years."

9:14 - Josh Marshall points out something about CBS News that I had also noticed: the online streaming debate after the one-hour mark has been "almost unwatchable." [ADDED: Here's someone on Twitter who also calls it "unwatchable." Nate Silver of the New York Times gave up on watching after the first hour.] It keeps stopping and starting — and you don't get to hear the part that was going on while it stopped, so you miss out on big chunks of the debate and only get to hear partial sentences. Marshall says that National Journal's feed is better, but I'm not able to play that feed at all. I'm using a MacBook Pro with almost no other applications running, and I'm sure Marshall, one of the most successful bloggers in the world, has a decent internet setup.

9:15 - Romney says we should return Medicaid to the states, which would save $100 billion a year. (I thought this was the foreign-policy debate.)

9:20 - Bachmann says we need to eliminate every program President Lyndon B. Johnson gave us as "the Great Society." "If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. They save for their own retirement." Of course, Social Security is us saving for our retirement. It's just a way to pool everyone's money for some of those savings.

9:26 - Huntsman: "I've negotiated with Pakistanis, both in government and in business." This might be Huntsman's strongest debate. I'm not hearing him give his usual delicate circumlocutions.

The debate is over. As the camera pans away, I notice that Gingrich was positioned closer to the center than Perry, indicating that Gingrich is rising and Perry is slipping. (I'm pretty sure the lesser candidates like Huntsman and Santorum have always been at or near the end, and Romney is always in the middle.)

Josh Marshall, a committed Democrat, praises Santorum's performance. Half an hour into the debate, he wrote:

I don't agree with much that Rick Santorum believes in foreign policy, though his answer on Pakistan was pretty reasonable. Yet it's clear that he's one of the few guys up there who thought about any of these issues before he realized that he'd have to answer questions about them in a foreign policy debate.

At the end, Marshall added:

Santorum is far and away the most lucid and knowledgable person on foreign policy.

The prominent conservative blogger Erick Erickson pans Cain on Twitter:

It is safe to say Herman Cain is the biggest loser tonight. What a damn shame. Just wow.

Similarly, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic says:

Herman Cain seems much less confident, charismatic tonight. Equally uninformed as before.

Cain did often seem like a deer in the headlights (though it was hard to tell because of CBS News's spluttering feed). Someone on Twitter named Sean Agnew seems to agree:

I don't want Cain answering the 3am call. #sorry

Stephen Hayes, who works for The Weekly Standard and Fox News, responds to an answer by Cain that I either wasn't paying attention to or couldn't hear in full because CBS News doesn't know how to do a live online feed:

Really? President Cain would have supported both Hosni Mubarak in Egypt? And Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen? Sheesh.

Ben Smith at Politico says on Twitter:

Perry guy who sent a despairing 'sad' email after last debate now writes: "happy days here again! breaking out the bourbon!"

On Twitter, "Jason (the Commenter)" (who also regularly comments here) puts 4 of the candidates on a spectrum:

Hates torture to loves torture: Paul, Huntsman, Cain, Bachmann.

In the comments, Jason makes a very important point, which I had missed:

The biggest fail of the evening was Cain, who said that nine countries have nuclear weapons. You can only get that number if you include Israel, and they are adamant about neither confirming or denying that rumor. He threw them under the bus.

Another thing I didn't notice: many people on Twitter are saying Perry coined a new word tonight: "forewithal." Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker says:

Perry comeback? On the one hand, he made a great joke. On the other he called into question alliance with Israel and said forewithal.

Which American city overpays the most in federal taxes, relative to the federal benefits it receives?

2011-11-12T11:07:00.001-05:00

San Francisco. Another one of the most overpaying cities is New York City.

Carbon monoxide

2011-11-12T09:00:00.000-05:00

It's good for you! (via)

David Brooks dissects America's norms on "inequality"

2011-11-11T08:54:00.001-05:00

They're complicated. A sample:

Academic inequality is socially acceptable. It is perfectly fine to demonstrate that you are in the academic top 1 percent by wearing a Princeton, Harvard or Stanford sweatshirt.

Ancestor inequality is not socially acceptable. It is not permissible to go around bragging that your family came over on the Mayflower and that you are descended from generations of Throgmorton-Winthrops who bequeathed a legacy of good breeding and fine manners.

Fitness inequality is acceptable. It is perfectly fine to wear tight workout sweats to show the world that pilates have given you buns of steel. These sorts of displays are welcomed as evidence of your commendable self-discipline and reproductive merit.

Moral fitness inequality is unacceptable. It is out of bounds to boast of your superior chastity, integrity, honor or honesty. Instead, one must respect the fact that we are all morally equal, though our behavior and ethical tastes may differ.

Martial arts don't prepare you to defend against real-world violence.

2011-11-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

So says Sam Harris, explaining how to deal with violence. Excerpt:

Herein lies a crucial distinction between traditional martial arts and realistic self-defense: Most martial artists train for a “fight.” Opponents assume ready stances, just out of each other’s range, and then practice various techniques or spar (engage in controlled fighting). This does not simulate real violence. It doesn’t prepare you to respond effectively to a sudden attack, in which you have been hit before you even knew you were threatened, and it doesn’t teach you to strike preemptively, without telegraphing your moves, once you have determined that an attack is imminent.

Live-blogging tonight's Republican presidential debate

2011-11-09T20:06:00.002-05:00

[Here's the transcript.]

8:20 - I finally found the live video online. I missed the first 20 minutes of the debate because CNBC is foolishly not streaming it.

8:21 - Herman Cain is asked about "character issues." The audience boos. "The American people deserve better than someone being tried in the court of public opinion based on unfounded accusations." Of course, he pivots to saying what people care about is the "issues."

8:23 - Mitt Romney is asked: "Would you keep [Cain] on if you had bought his company?" Romney wisely refuses to answer. When the moderator says, "I'm going to switch back to the economy," the audience cheers.

8:24 - Jon Huntsman on Occupy Wall Street: "I want to be president of the 99%. I also want to be president of the 1%." He doesn't like OWS's anti-capitalism, but he does agree with them that we need to stop "bailing out corporations." Huntsman is right.

8:26 - Romney says Democrats incoherently think "they like jobs, but they don't like businesses."

8:28 - Newt Gingrich blames the news media for not "reporting accurately how the economy works." The moderator presses him to specify what the media reports inaccurately about the economy. Gingrich says, for example, the media never asks the OWS protesters: "Who's going to pay for the park you're occupying if there are no businesses?"

8:33 - Cain is asked about the fact that the rates could be increased on his 9/9/9 tax plan after it gets passed. Cain's answer: "Tax codes don't raise taxes, politicians do." He claims, absurdly, that "the people" will prevent the rates from ever increasing.

8:36 - Michele Bachmann says "we all need to sacrifice," so she would make sure everyone pays a federal income tax. So I guess she doesn't think people deserve to keep all their money, as she said in an earlier debate. This is also a blatant flip-flop from her pledge not to raise taxes, since she's talking about raising many people's federal income taxes from zero.

8:44 - Question to Romney: "Not one of the points in your 59-point economic plan mentions housing. Can you tell us why?" Romney: "Yeah, because it's not a housing plan."

8:57 - A moderator asks each candidate to explain how, after repealing Obamacare, they'd fix the health-care system. Each candidate gets 30 seconds! Gingrich says he'd need to take two whole "Lincoln-Douglas style debates" in order to answer this question. Moderator: "Do you want to answer the question tonight?"

9:04 - Romney gives us a bizarre non sequitur: 18% of our GDP is spent on health care; the most any other country spends is 12%. Therefore, Romney says, we need to switch to a "market" system. But we're the country with market-based health care; those other countries spend less by having universal health care!

9:06 - As one moderator is saying they're about to go to commercials, another moderator cuts in to make fun of the health-care question: "Before we go, I want to give every candidate 15 seconds to solve the deficit problem."

9:15 - Romney criticizes President Obama for being driven by a desire to get re-elected.

9:17 - My brother Chris IMs (and gives me permission to quote):

Perry just had the worst moment of any candidate in a debate I think I've ever seen!

Perry started out by saying he was going to list 3 agencies that should be abolished. He said "Education, Commerce" — but then spent a very long time trying to think of the third one. Another candidate suggested: "EPA." Perry jokingly said, "Yeah, the EPA." The moderator asked Perry if he seriously meant the EPA, and he said no. Finally, he admitted he just couldn't think of the rest of his message. Perry ended his segment by actually saying out loud: "Oops!"

I'll post the video of that moment once I can find it on YouTube. I'm absolutely sure it will be on YouTube. Perry just doesn't seem to care about running for president.

[UPDATE: Here it is. I can't embed it.]

HuffPo already has a series of Twitter posts skewering Perry's embarrassment:

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your .... uh, oh God, give me a moment." #PerryStatements

"Mr. Gorbachev: Tear down this .... what's the word for it? Ummmmmmm...Wait, I know this one." #perrystatements

"Read my lips: No new .... uh....I honestly can't remember" #PerryStatements

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto....uh, um, you know, the person that is "me" but, you know, not "me"?? #perrystatements

Rick Perry: There are three agencies I want to eliminate: Commerce, Education ....and the Department of My Campaign Is Over

Shortly after Perry's blunder, Rich Lowry of National Review says (in 2 Twitter posts):

this may be the debate when it became a contest btwn cain and gingrich to be the alternative to romney

to think rick perry getting into the race may have played into paul ryan's decision to stay out

9:31 - After several other candidates have spoken, Perry gets his next question, and he finally explains that he was trying to think of the Department of Energy. Meanwhile, he came out in favor of cutting defense spending.

9:36 - The top headline on TalkingPointsMemo right now, with a photograph of Perry at the debate:

Um, Um, Um ...

9:43 - WaPo's The Fix says (in multiple Twitter posts):

The Perry thing will be replayed relentlessly over the next 24-48 hours. Not going to be good. But Herman Cain is happy.

Perry people will start jumping ship -- or at least giving negative background quotes -- in 4,3,2...

The remainder of the debate after Perry's brain freeze will be ignored in post-game analysis unless some major news is made.

Biggest problem for Perry will be donors. Hard to recruit big $ people to the cause after such a big swing and miss.

My mom, Ann Althouse, has posted the video of Perry followed by a reader poll. She asks the appropriate question: "How horrible is it?"

The debate is now over. I wasn't able to pay attention to anything else after the Perry disaster.

Rich Lowry points out something very significant, which I hadn't noticed:

no one bothers attacking rick perry any more

Jonah Goldberg says:

On the plus side, Perry's campaign can at least have an open casket.

Turtles that look like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

2011-11-09T15:30:00.000-05:00

Here they are.

Is Jon Huntsman the "conservative" candidate?

2011-11-09T01:03:00.000-05:00

Michael B. Dougherty argues that Huntsman is the strongest conservative candidate for president, but he just isn't expressing it well:

Dougherty points out that Huntsman's speaking style might be turning off Republicans voters because he "speak[s] like a diplomat" and uses "circumlocu[tions]." I've noticed that Huntsman will often phrase his statements in terms of the overall discussion. This creates a distance between himself and his words. I wrote in one of my debate live-blogs:

Huntsman [says]: "This country needs more workers. Can we say that? This country needs more workers." When he asks if "we" can say that, he intends to present himself as someone who has the courage to speak the truth, but he ends up sounding like he's weak, tentative, in need of others' approval.

Huntsman needs to learn to get to the point — without asking for permission to do so.

Why are journalists wildly inconsistent in whether they're willing to report on sex/harassment scandals?

2011-11-04T20:45:00.000-04:00

Mickey Kaus has a unifying theory: Journalists are moderately liberal patriots.

The problems with poverty statistics

2011-11-04T11:31:00.000-04:00

The U.S. Census Bureau's September report saying that poverty is soaring may have been "off the mark."

The New York Times explains:

Concocted on the fly a half-century ago, the official poverty measure ignores ever more of what is happening to the poor person’s wallet — good and bad. . . .

[S]afety-net programs have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship: as much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappears.

The Times also says the Census Bureau's report ignored the fact that "rents are higher in places like Manhattan than they are in Mississippi."

There are "fewer people in abject destitution, but a great many more crowding the hard-luck ranks of the near poor, who do not qualify for many benefit programs."

The Census Bureau will release a new report on Monday, hopefully correcting some of these errors.

This other New York Times piece looks at other measures of poverty from the past few years. Some of the findings:

Poverty is declining among women ages 25-39.

Five million children in America have risen out of poverty in the past 10 years.

Poverty is declining among Hispanics, and declining dramatically among blacks. Poverty is increasing among Asians.

Poverty is decreasing in rural areas and increasing in urban areas.

Poverty appears to be increasing among the elderly, but this "could be a statistical anomaly. Many elderly people use retirement savings but do not report that money as income."

Do birds follow grammar rules?

2011-11-03T14:13:00.000-04:00

Maybe.

Could Republicans win in the long run by losing the presidency in 2012?

2011-11-03T11:23:00.001-04:00

Alex Knepper makes the Republican case for "supporting" President Obama's reelection. Excerpt:

Instead of flailing through a doomed McCain presidency, the Republican Party went through a few years of soul-searching. It has miraculously shaken off the Bush brand and is newly focused on economic liberty and the debt crisis — and that’s just in a few years’ time. If, say, Herman Cain is nominated and loses to Obama, it could possibly serve as the wake-up call that the party base needs to discipline itself, setting up a candidate like Chris Christie to easily walk to victory in 2016. (Worse, if Herman Cain wins, we will fail in our goals of addressing the debt crisis and rolling back left-wing policies. He is awful at public relations management and has not proven himself as a political leader.)

Moreover, it’s not as if — despite his oft-stated wishes — Obama can single-handedly enact harmful policies. The worst of the Obama era — four years or eight — is over. The Republican House already acts as a buffer on his left-wing dreams, and if we focus on re-taking the Senate, he will be rendered virtually impotent. He is no Bill Clinton: he’s not going to co-opt conservative ideas and spin them into left-wing victories. He’s not smart, savvy, or pragmatic enough to do it — he’d have already done so if he were. He’d simply have a failed second term, setting up a Republican to cruise to victory in 2016 — and the field next time is bound to be better, with people like Christie, Jindal, and possibly Ryan raring to run.

Sometimes, when you lose, you win. We have a competent slate of candidates waiting for us in 2016, should we lose to Obama. Since none of the Republican candidates this year are acceptable, I feel that I have no choice but to support Obama’s re-election and wait for 2016.

"Frog fail"

2011-11-02T21:38:00.001-04:00

Rick Perry's "flat tax"

2011-10-26T08:49:00.002-04:00

It isn't flat.

Perry says he's against progressive taxation and wants a tax code "that you can put on a postcard." But his own plan doesn't eliminate the federal income tax rates. He keeps those rates but adds an alternative flat tax, which you're apparently free to choose or reject. So he seems to want to complicate the federal income tax. You might still be able to write his plan on a postcard, by writing out the 6 tax brackets plus an alternative flat tax. On the other hand, that means the progressive tax could also fit on a postcard.

There's no significant difference between Perry's plan and the current income tax as far as simplicity or length. The real difference is that, as the first link explains, Perry's plan would be a huge tax cut for the rich, which would decrease revenue, which would increase the deficit.

Perry says that reducing tax revenue would be a good thing, since then we'll need to reduce federal spending. "All of these tax cuts will be meaningless if we do not control federal spending." So he seems to subscribe to the "starve the beast" theory. Well, that theory has been tried, and it doesn't work.

Anderson!

2011-10-21T18:32:00.000-04:00

Days after the last Republican presidential debate, I still can't stop laughing at this video from TalkingPointsMemo:

Have educated women stopped getting married?

2011-10-20T23:39:00.000-04:00

Nope.

Anderson Cooper's "47 percent" tax lie in the debate

2011-10-19T17:00:00.000-04:00

In last night's debate, Anderson Cooper asked this question:

Congresswoman Bachmann, you said in the last debate that everyone should pay something. Does that mean that you would raise taxes on the 47 percent of Americans who currently don’t pay taxes?

Greg Sargent says:

I don’t really consider it part of my job here to think about where candidates messed up, especially since a lot of their factually incorrect statements are just playing to their audience, and you sort of have to expect a lot of that. But Anderson Cooper, the CNN moderator, has no excuse: his claim that 47% of American pay no taxes was inexcusable. Just terrible. The correct stat is that 47% of US households don’t pay federal income taxes, which is very different. It’s bad when politicians get basic factual stuff wrong; it’s terrible when CNN does. To me at least, the debate had a clear loser, and it was Anderson Cooper and CNN for that question.

Live-blogging CNN's Las Vegas Republican presidential debate

2011-10-18T19:45:00.000-04:00

I'll be live-blogging the debate starting soon. There will also be live-blogging on TalkingPointsMemo, National Review, and the New York Times.

Feel free to post any comments about the debate (or the election) in the comments.

[ADDED: Here's the transcript, and here's the video:]

7:58 - This seems to be online only: we see someone warming up the audience, encouraging them to applaud as wildly as possible. He introduces Anderson Cooper (who I walked by on the street the other day). Cooper tells the audience we're going to start with the National Anthem, which he'll sing very quietly because he has a terrible voice. Good, this will give me time to make a salad before the actual debate starts.

8:02 - The opening sequence has majestic music (to conjure up the West), and an announcer gives us a basic run-down of who has what at stake. After summing up Mitt Romney (holding steady in the top tier), Rick Perry ("trying to get back on track after a meteoric rise"), and Herman Cain (surging), the announcer says that Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul are still trying to break through, while Rick Santorum is described as trying to "beat the odds." Santorum fans (if they exist) had to cringe that he was placed in a lower tier than everyone else including Ron Paul.

8:07 - An aggressively masculine rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.

8:08 - Fortunately, this is the second debate in a row with no bells to signal when a candidate's time is up.

8:09 - Everyone is giving an opening statement. Santorum includes a sweet message to his daughter, who had surgery today and is doing fine.

8:10 - In Cain's opening statement, he says he's "a businessman, which means I solve problems for a living." Romney goes next and awkwardly echoes Cain's intro.

8:10 - In his opening statement, Perry forcefully says he's "an authentic conservative, not a conservative of convenience." A heavy-handed swipe at Romney.

As always, I'm writing down quotes on the fly, so they may not be verbatim.

8:14 - Santorum: "Herman's well-meaning." But 84% of Americans will pay more in taxes under Cain's 9/9/9 plan.

8:16 - Cain denies that he's proposing a value added tax. Bachmann insists that he is proposing a VAT. (I recently blogged about this.) The VAT just tricks people into thinking businesses, instead of government, are making them pay more.

8:17 - Perry calls Cain "brother" twice in his answer on why the 9/9/9 plan won't work. [Here's the video, which also shows that he uses a different word for Romney:]

8:19 - Paul makes a crucial, surprisingly overlooked, point: any time you increase spending, you're effectively raising taxes (I would add: especially as long as we're in debt). The taxes will have to go up sooner or later. The fact that we don't experience the tax increases right away doesn't change this fact.

8:21 - So far it's almost all been about 9/9/9. There's a lively exchange between Cain and Romney. Cain says Romney and Perry are "mixing apples and oranges" by equating his proposed federal sales tax with the current state sales taxes. Romney retorts: "I'll have a bushel of apples and oranges, because I'll be paying both taxes."

8:24 - Bachmann says "every American should pay something" in taxes. Well that's good, because that's already true.

8:25 - Perry says he's finally released his economic plan. His plan is to extract our own energy, which would "create 1.2 million jobs." How long a period of time do you think he's referring to? A quarter? A year? Nope. 7 years.

8:29 - Santorum uses his favorite strategy of interrupting another candidate, and Romney responds very sharply, repeatedly saying: "Rick, you've had your chance — let me speak." That might be the most heated moment Romney has had in any of these debates. Santorum eventually announces that Romney's time is up before he's gotten a chance to say one sentence! The audience boos.

8:33 - Romney gets Gingrich to admit that Romney got the idea for his health-care plan's individual mandate from Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation.

8:42 - Perry says "Mitt loses all standing" on illegal immigration because Romney hired an illegal immigrant and knew about it for a year. Once Romney starts answering, Perry uses an uncannily similar strategy to Santorum's, jabbering over Romney for the whole time he's talking. Romney (who's right next to Perry) puts his hand on Perry's shoulder and leaves it there for a long time. Romney: "You have a problem with allowing someone to finish speaking. And I'd suggest that if you want to be President of the United States, you ought to let both people speak." Have Perry and Santorum privately agreed to the same line of attack against Romney — talking over him throughout his whole time — or did Perry spontaneously decide to emulate Santorum? Either way, Perry and Santorum are using a cowardly tactic and creating the impression that they're afraid of letting Americans hear the whole debate.

8:46 - Anderson Cooper asks Cain why he said he supported an electrified fence along the southern border, then said it was a joke, then said he stood by the statement and just didn't want to offend anyone! Cain starts out saying he's finally going to be serious, but he doesn't clarify whether he still supports an electrified fence.

8:52 - I just noticed this is the first debate without Jon Huntsman. [ADDED: He's boycotting Nevada. That'll do him a lot of good.]

8:52 - Perry brings back his attack against Romney for supposedly hiring illegal immigrants. The audience boos very loudly for a long time. Romney says: "We've been down that road sufficiently, and it sounds like the audience agrees with me." Once Romney says that, the audience immediately switches to cheering. That was Perry's big attempt to offset the charges that he himself is soft on illegal immigration, and the attempt failed miserably.

9:01 - I'm adding the "free speech" tag to this post, since the candidates seem to disagree on whether they should all get a chance to speak.

9:11 - Cain stands by his past statement about Occupy Wall Street: that if you're not rich, blame yourself. Ron Paul: "Cain is blaming the victims."

9:21 - Santorum makes a smart statement on the relevance of religion in a presidential race. The candidate's faith has to do with their values, and that's relevant for voters to consider. In contrast, whether the candidate is right or wrong about "the road to salvation" shouldn't be part of the political arena.

9:22 - Gingrich tries to outdo Santorum by saying that the idea that we were "created by a loving God" defines the boundaries of . . . what? (I'm having trouble paraphrasing him because I found this so incoherent.)

9:23 - Perry has been pausing a lot throughout the debate.

9:33 - Paul: "We have enough weapons to blow up the world 20, 25 times."

9:37 - Paul would "cut all foreign aid," which is "taking money from poor people in this country and giving it to rich people in poor countries." He emphasizes that this includes Israel.

9:41 - Gingrich, answering a question by Paul, says that the Iranian "arms for hostages" deal in the '80s was "a terrible mistake."

9:46 - Santorum says Romney in Massachusetts "ran as a liberal, to the left of Ted Kennedy." Romney laughs on cue.

9:48 - Romney: 40% of the jobs created in the last several years in Texas have gone to illegal immigrants. Perry says this is wrong, and adds: "You failed as the governor of Massachusetts." Romney responds that his unemployment rate in Massachusetts was lower than Perry's in Texas during the same time period.

9:49 - Romney: We need "someone who's created jobs, not just watched them being created by others."

9:50 - Cooper asks Cain a dumb question: Should either Romney or Perry be President? "No, I should be President!"

That's all. Now, here's the moment this debate will be remembered for:

Jonah Goldberg says:

I don’t think anyone left the debate more likable than they were when they went in, with the possible exception of Newt.

Maybe he was reading Jason (the Commenter)'s Twitter feed:

My scoring of the debates: Cain -1, Romney -2, Perry -5, Bachmann -1, Santorum -2, Newt (my new favorite)

Goldberg elaborates:

I thought Perry had his best performance so far, but it was awfully shaky at times and he struck me as unlikable at times. If this had been his first debate, he might still be the frontrunner, albeit with a lot of chatter about how he needs to get better.

Romney still won the debate but I think he finally got bloodied on RomneyCare in a way he hadn’t in the past. He also looked angry and flustered for the first time ever. It might humanize him for some people. Or it might make him look weak.

Cain wilted under the pressure, but didn’t fold. He needs to learn how to talk about 9-9-9 in a granular way without asserting ignorance, laziness or dishonesty on the part of its critics. He remains a mess on foreign policy.

Santorum was the winner on points in almost all of his exchanges but he simply cannot stop sounding whiney, angry or aggrieved. . . . [H]is tone is so unpresidential you want him to stop talking even when he’s winning.

Bachmann’s simply a diminished candidate who thinks saying Obama is a one-term president is an argument for her.

All in all, an exhausting debate.

Is Herman Cain's 9/9/9 tax plan really a 9/18 plan?

2011-10-16T13:17:00.002-04:00

According to an article on the American Enterprise Institute's site:

A [value added tax (VAT)] and a retail sales tax are conceptually equivalent consumption taxes, apart from administrative and compliance issues. The [9/9/9] plan is therefore better described as featuring a 9 percent income tax and an 18 percent consumption tax.

That assumes that when Cain says he'll have a "9% business tax," he really means a VAT. I don't know if that's true. The article says it's been "confirmed by the economic analysis circulated by Cain's campaign," but that's pretty vague.

Cain's website says this tax will be on a business's "[g]ross income less all purchases from other U.S. located businesses, all capital investment, and net exports." The Wikipedia entry for "gross receipts tax" (a.k.a. "gross excise tax") says:

A gross receipts tax is similar to a sales tax, but it is levied on the seller of goods or services rather than the consumer.

In the last debate, Cain said his 9/9/9 plan is "simple, transparent, efficient, fair, and neutral." Many people have noted that it's hardly "efficient," "fair," or "neutral," but I'm not even convinced that it's "simple" or "transparent."

UPDATE: The Economist has an editorial entitled "Dial 9-9-9 for nonsense," which says:

Mr Cain touts the simplicity of the 9-9-9 plan, but it is anything but simple. Even after reading about it on Mr Cain's campaign site, I'm still not sure I understand it. I thought I knew that the plan proposed 9% income, sales, and corporate tax rates. But the corporate tax is not a simple reduction in the corporate tax rate, as I had thought, but a value-added-tax on "Gross income less all purchases from other U.S. located businesses, all capital investment, and net exports."

The Editors of National Review have also come out against the 9/9/9 plan, saying that the corporate tax is really a VAT.

The statistical point that neuroscience papers get wrong half the time

2011-10-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

Ben Goldacre explains.

The explanation does take a few dense paragraphs; Goldacre admits his own writing is going to cause some "pain" for readers, and I had to read it twice before I got it. But it's worth it for anyone interested in brain studies.

UPDATE: I posted the article to Metafilter, where a commenter named "valkyryn" takes another shot at explaining it:

Say we've got two samples, A and B. For our sample size and subject matter, if we expose it to chemical X, any detected results need to be above 20 Units (U) to be statistically significant.

We expose A to X, and we get a result of 30U. That's statistically significant.

We expose B to X, and we get a result of 15U. That isn't statistically significant.

But note that the result for A is less than 20U from the result for B. This means that while we did have a statistically significant finding for A, the difference between A and B is not statistically significant.

This significantly diminishes the value of our findings, as the math only supports a relatively unambitious claim. We want to say that A and B are different, but the math won't let us, as the difference in reaction between A and B is too small. We're left with a relatively uninteresting finding, namely that something seems to happen with A and X, but we aren't sure how much that matters.

Careers tend not to be made out of this kind of finding, and the author is implying that because scientists have an interest in careers, they're making more ambitious claims than their studies actually permit.

IN THE COMMENTS: LemmusLemmus illustrates the problem with this graph:

LemmusLemmus explains:

The result for condition A is significantly different from zero (i.e., it "is significant"), while the result for condition B is not (the confidence interval for A does not include zero, but the confidence interval for B does). However, the two confidence intervals overlap, which means that the results for conditions A and B are not significantly different from each other.

Should liberals support the Occupy Wall Street protests?

2011-10-13T08:00:00.001-04:00

Nope, argues The New Republic:

At first blush, it would be difficult not to cheer the protesters who have descended on lower Manhattan—and are massing in other cities across the United States—because they have chosen a deserving target. Wall Street should be protested. Its resistance to needed regulations that would stabilize the U.S. economy is shameful. And, insofar as it has long opposed appropriate levels of government spending and taxation, it has helped to create a society that does a deeply flawed job of providing for its most vulnerable, educating its young, and guaranteeing economic opportunity for all.

But, to draw on the old cliché, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Just because liberals are frustrated with Wall Street does not mean that we should automatically find common cause with a group of people who are protesting Wall Street. Indeed, one of the first obligations of liberalism is skepticism—of governments, of arguments, and of movements. . . .

One of the core differences between liberals and radicals is that liberals are capitalists. They believe in a capitalism that is democratically regulated—that seeks to level an unfair economic playing field so that all citizens have the freedom to make what they want of their lives. But these are not the principles we are hearing from the protesters. Instead, we are hearing calls for the upending of capitalism entirely. American capitalism may be flawed, but it is not, as Slavoj Zizek implied in a speech to the protesters, the equivalent of Chinese suppression. “[In] 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel,” Zizek declared. “This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here, we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.” This is not a statement of liberal values; moreover, it is a statement that should be deeply offensive to liberals, who do not in any way seek the end of capitalism. . . .

And it is just not the protesters’ apparent allergy to capitalism and suspicion of normal democratic politics that should raise concerns. It is also their temperament. The protests have made a big deal of the fact that they arrive at their decisions through a deliberative process. But all their talk of “general assemblies” and “communiqués” and “consensus” has an air of group-think about it that is, or should be, troubling to liberals. “We speak as one,” Occupy Wall Street stated in its first communiqué, from September 19. “All of our decisions, from our choices to march on Wall Street to our decision to camp at One Liberty Plaza were decided through a consensus process by the group, for the group.” The air of group-think is only heightened by a technique called the “human microphone” that has become something of a signature for the protesters. When someone speaks, he or she pauses every few words and the crowd repeats what the person has just said in unison. The idea was apparently logistical—to project speeches across a wide area—but the effect when captured on video is genuinely creepy.

Why it's better to fund solar energy with venture capital than with government loans

2011-10-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

A compelling argument by Megan McArdle.

The whole post is worth reading, but here's a sample:

A number of people have claimed that the government had to make these loans because they're "too risky" or "too big" for the private sector, forcing the government to act as a VC firm. That riskiness means that yes, a non-insubstantial number of the loans will fail.

But this doesn't really make any sense. The private sector doesn't have any trouble dealing with risky ventures; it simply prices the capital accordingly, demanding high interest rates, or a larger equity chunk, in exchange for money. . . .

[A]t the company level, there's no difference between an optimal market outcome, and an optimal social outcome (from the DOE's point of view); both investors and society benefit if more solar cells are sold. If the solar cells are unlikely to be sold to many people, than the loan guarantee is not a good idea — it will not foster much environmental benefit. If the solar cells are likely to be sold to many people, than the loan guarantee should not be needed; private investors should be easily found to back the manufacturing.