Running on the foot-in-mouth platform

Has anyone seen my keys?

Putting the extra D and G to work, Judd Gregg says:

"My gut tells me that we'll need a weekend of drama — maybe a weekend of the government not paying its bills — politicians need drama to make something happen. As soon as social security checks don't go out, the politics will change. I suspect it'll take artificial drama to get closure past the house."

A missing social security check won't feel very "artificial"to a lot of people, Senator.

So there was a republican debate tonight

I'm so high right now

And like an idiot, I watched it.

 Lessons learned:

• By applause, Ron "We Buy Gold" Paul was the clear victor. Who (other than the powerful) doesn't love Ron Paul? He articulates a clear, consistent philosophy. Even though the philosophy is pretty dumb, it's still super refreshing. 

• Luntz and his focus group were absolutely crazy for Herman "The Godfather" Cain. I've never even heard of this guy, but now I can say: You, sir, are no Ross Perot. That he did so well in Luntzville is just further proof that Republicans are crazy.

• Santorum was a delightfully frothy mix. Luntz's focus group gave him second place. 

• T-Paw was smooth, and he really could be a contender. And I love that he embraces the appellation. It's fratty, but still pretty cool… for a presidential candidate. I'm hoping Obama embraces "B-Rock."

• Luntz's group thought, to a person, that Barack Obama is a socialist, even when challenged by Luntz. 

• Luntz's group was heavily populated with mouth-breathers (there's video evidence). 

Did you watch? Who is your guy or gal in the republican field? My pick is clearly Gary "Smokey" Johnson.

Chart of the decade

That's from Chuck Marr via Jon Chait, who writes:

Now, the flaw in the liberal story is the lack of an ironclad causal mechanism. Liberals have a lot of fairly persuasive stories about how this happened -- political power, the decline of unions, monetary policy, changing social norms -- but all those stories have at least some problems. Still, that chart captures the overriding economic problem of the current era. It also explains why policy solutions like the "Road to Prosperity" are so insane. It is based not only on ignoring this overriding reality but of accelerating it. Ryan's premise that liberating the wealthy from their social obligation will create mass prosperity. It could not be more out of touch with reality.

I'll take door number three, Greg

Greg Mankiw writes:

According to new research from Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson:

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.

I am not at all sure how to interpret this finding. It sounds like either the women's movement was a mistake or subjective happiness is not the right objective.

Dr. Mankiw should have stopped at "I am not at all sure how to interpret this finding..."

Obviously the women's movement is not yet complete. Women are under intense social and financial pressures that men just don't have to deal with, and many of those are the result of continuing, pervasive sexism. So I think it's pretty ballsy ^* to claim that--because it hasn't achieved its goals yet--the movement is a mistake.

lame update: i forgot to quote mankiw! fixed now.
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^* Get it?

Feminism > stupidism

Did Palin's Looks Hurt?

...So at least in this sample, it was Republicans and independents who were internally debating Palin’s suitability for the job. The study suggests that their confidence in her abilities may have decreased the more they focused on her looks – and thus, in feminist terms, objectified her.

Well, as feminists would put it, "no shit, sherlock." Palin enthusiasts held her up as their party's Hillary... but hot! Get it!?

(No, they didn't get it.)

OK, but the devil is in the details

Mail to Jonathan Martin:

Re: For the GOP, the cavalry apparently isn t coming.

Yes, there is....ask the Lord.

It is HIS election. Watch Him.

Check your history books.

Bingo.

Elaine

Sarah Palin, quoted by CNN:

“And it also strengthens my faith because I know at the end of the day putting this in God’s hands, the right thing for America will be done, at the end of the day on Nov. 4.”

I just wanted to get this down on the Blog of Record, so when we look back at what happened, we know whom to blame.

More updates please? Well, okay then:

Dobson says that he and other pastors have been praying to God for his intervention in the election: "We were just asking for, rather boldly asking, for a miracle with regard to the election this year."

Polarization

"liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God,"

I know I'm stating the obvious, here, but it is very difficult to have a good-faith conversation with a group of people if one thinks that group secretly believes that, and only keep it to themselves (usually) for political reasons. 

Not so conservative behind closed doors

According to a 1973 Supreme Court decision, one of the yardsticks used to determine if material can be considered obscene is whether said material violates “contemporary community standards”. Which is why, in his defense of an adult website operator, lawyer Lawrence Walters is using google search information from the area the trial is taking place in.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

| Grinding |

My main motivation for posting this is that it is wonderful. But I would also like to loop this back in to our recent discussions (here and here) about how society adjusts to a lack of privacy. It seems to me that privacy advocates are unwilling to acknowledge the disadvantages of privacy. Today's example: public policy that based on rank hypocrisy by social conservatives.

(I hope to do some more thoughtful posts about privacy soon, in which we might connect the dots between some of these instabloggy posts.)

A note about "Conservapedia"

This blogger is continuously astonished at how his suspicions about social conservatives are confirmed over and over again. Via eggsyntax:

Wikipedia is "The Free Encyclopedia." What's on the mind of Wikipedia its readers? Here are the top ten most viewed pages on Wikipedia:

Main Page [30,090,900]
Wiki [904,800]
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows [413,400]
Naruto [401,400]
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock [396,000]
United States [330,000]
Wikipedia [329,400]
Deaths in 2007 [321,300]
Heroes (TV series) [307,500]
Transformers (film) [303,600]

Conservapedia is "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia." What's on the mind of its readers? Here are the top ten most viewed pages on Conservapedia:

Main Page‎ [1,906,729]
Homosexuality‎ [1,572,713]
Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [517,086]
Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [420,687]
Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [389,052]
Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [388,123]
Homosexuality and Domestic Violence‎ [365,888]
Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [331,553]
Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [291,179]
Homosexuality and Syphilis‎ [265,322

And if frogs had wings...

By leaving, Rove could be doing his last bit of service to the president: If it's a successful last year, the myth of "Bush's brain" may be laid to rest.

If it's a successful last year.... Good one, K-Jo. That's a knee slapper.

Also, it would be irrational to assert that you KNOW that there isn't an invisible immaterial monkey sitting on your head

The latest from the fever swamp.

Busted down to "Lieutenant America"

The boys at the Corner, jumping off this WSJ editorial about the death of Captain America, lament just "...how left-wing popular comics can be."

I love reading The Corner. It's a blast just trying to grok the world in which writers and artists are expected to be conservatives instead of broke bohemians. Perhaps Cliff May thinks comic book creators in the 70's were publishing tycoons, hobnobbing with the upper crust, rather than, you know, artists and writers, struggling to pay the rent.

Slightly more seriously, I suspect that because of the nature of their job, comic-book writers do more thought experiments about power and it's responsible use in a year than Cliff May does in a decade.

"With great power comes great responsibility" --Stan Lee

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias, who apparently still reads comic books (and there's nothing wrong with that, people), found another example of Cliff May's handwringing over the antics of men in tights.

---

P.S. Last night on Colbert, Colbert found out that Captain America left his shield to Stephen Colbert! He found out from a letter from a Marvel editor that contained the phrase, "Welcome to the Marvel Universe."

That's pretty awesome.

P.P.S., I'm amazed we didn't mention Captain America on this blog last week.

Where the hell is the bathroom, Pedro?

I feel bad making fun of John Derbyshire, as he tries very hard (and usually fails) to keep The Corner anchored in something resembling reality, but this is too funny.

My son starts Middle School in September.  We just got a flyer from the school board asking him to choose a foreign language class.  The choices are:  French, Italian, Spanish.

My advice to him (which of course he will ignore) is just to be hard-headed about it & pick the language most likely to give him an "edge" in future employment. 

That rules out Spanish, since the USA is choc-a-bloc with Spanish-speakers, so the market value of this skill must be low. 

I don't know where Derbyshire lives, but in my neck of the woods it would be very helpful to speak Spanish if one wants to do anything at all in the community... for example, if one wants to open a small business.

Or to put it another way: The USA is already "choc-a-bloc" with English speakers, and the market value of that skill is commensurately very high.

Being a cheerful post addressing certain aspects of our nation's priapismic foreign policy

As the national conversation about Iraq grows ever more reasonable, it becomes easier and easier to fall prey to a sort of perverse optimism. Yes, the thinking goes, things are awful, but at least the right questions are being asked. At least the ISG report's assessment of the situation is grounded in reality. At least the Democrats aren't engaging in a more hawkish than thou pissing match with the Republicans. At least the American people seem to understand that this war is an unmitigated disaster. At least, at least, at least.

But, you know, as a certain wise head reminded us today, the President of the United States still has a raging hard on for this war. Maybe, just maybe a new fact has slipped into his worldview. Maybe he now believes that Iraq is spinning out of control into an ever more violent civil war. The question is, what is he going to do with this information?

Well, if the rumors are true then we have a good idea of the first part of his plan. He wants more troops in Baghdad. The thinking seems to be that we won the first battle of Baghdad too quickly, so it's time to start another, bloodier, one.

Huzzah!

In second step of the new plan for victory news, Bush seems to be taking certain parts of Powell's we-don't-have-enough-troops-to-control-Baghdad critique seriously:

"I'm inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops — the Army, the Marines," Bush told the Post. "And I talked about this to Secretary Gates and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea."
|The Washington Post|

The article includes the qualification that, "substantial military expansion will take years and would not be meaningful in the near term in Iraq." Which, you know, would be a comforting sentiment if there were some reason to hope that the next near term after this one was going to be one in which the United States wasn't bogged down in Iraq.