Month: November 2010

Gallup polls the likely nominees:

The current results on Republicans' presidential nomination preferences suggest the 2012 contest could be more wide open than any since the winners began to be determined largely through state primaries and caucuses in 1972. Since that time, there has typically been a clear Republican front-runner before the nominating campaign got underway, including Richard Nixon in 1972, Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1988 and 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and Rudy Giuliani in 2008. With the exception of Giuliani, the front-running candidate has prevailed.

Jonathan Bernstein recently made the same basic point.

Dave Roberts attended a workshop on behavior change. He found it sobering:

Many, many (many!) people cling to the notion that the way to motivate behavior change is simply to give people more information. Untold sums of money have been spent sending people brochures or sending them to websites where they can learn more; the results of those programs are almost uniformly dismal. Information is not motivation.

Others cling to a different illusion: that price alone can shift behavior, that financial self-interest is a kind of ur-motivation, trumping all others. Carbon pricing, according to the economist's dream, will drive cascading behavior change across the entire economy. In fact, as [Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr, a professor, consultant, and author of the book Fostering Sustainable Behavior] illustrated at length, programs driven by economic incentives (rebates, etc.) have underperformed again and again. As he told me later, he's a supporter of ecological tax reform, but we should be realistic …

A reader writes:

Haven't you seen The American President? As always, Aaron Sorkin got there first.

And second – another writes:

In one episode of "The West Wing", President Bartlet, who hasn't cooked in many years (obviously), has some questions about how to properly cook a turkey for Thanksgiving. He calls the Butterball hotline and trips over himself alternatively trying to say (and then hide) that he's the president. Here's the clip.

PPP does early polling in Virginia:

Obama leads Mitt Romney (48-43) and Mike Huckabee (49-44) each by 5 points in hypothetical contests, a margin similar to his victory over John McCain in the state. If the Republican nominee was either Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin Obama's lead widens to 11 points, by spreads of 52-41 and 51-40 respectively.

Politco's nationwide poll shows Obama losing to a generic Republican but beating the current GOP frontrunners.

Paul Armentano wishes the Senate would ask Michele Leonhart, Obama's nominee for director of the DEA, some tough questions:

* What are your plans for bridging the growing divide between state and federal law concerning the use of marijuana for medical purposes?

* How has the DEA changed its policies and practices to ensure compliance with the 2009 Department of Justice memo calling on federal law enforcement to no longer target individuals who are in compliance with the medical marijuana laws of their states?

* When will the DEA respond to a 2002 petition to hold hearings on the rescheduling of marijuana, as were called for by the American Medical Association?

 Mike Meno digs through her record.

Matt Yglesias skewers universities and their presidents:

The way a lot of industries are structured, the best way to get rich is to think up a way to produce whatever it is you’re producing cheaper. That way you can cut prices, increase sales volume and market share, all while increasing per unit profit margins. Not everything in the business world works like that, of course, but some of it does—especially the parts where you don’t see endlessly increasing prices.

Higher education in America just doesn’t work like that. The precise mechanisms through which you get to be one of the highest-paid university presidents are a bit opaque to me (and it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s more to compensation than salary), but they don’t have anything to do with the idea of offering a good value to students. So it’s natural that the key institutions don’t really focus on value.

Jim Horney puts the unemployment benefits debate in perspective:

[W]e have about 5 million people who would really suffer if those benefits expire or they’re not extended. … In recent decades, we have never let the extended benefits expire when unemployment was above 7.2 percent. Right now it’s at 9.6 percent, and yet we have people saying we should let these benefits expire. It’d be harmful both for the families that will not get the benefits and for the economy.

A small correction. I wrote that 50 million Americans have no access to health insurance. It would be more accurate to say that 50 million have no health insurance. The difference between those who have access but do not use it and those who have no access because they cannot afford it is worth a thousand examinations. Rather than go into all of that, I'll just correct the record.

The Big Lie from the FNC/RNC propaganda machine is that our entire debt has been suddenly created by president Obama who took office in the midst of the steepest downturn since the 1930s, a downturn that began under Bush. Now its true that he hasn't slashed spending in such a crisis – and borrowed to keep the economy from going straight into the abyss; and it's true that the recession so depressed revenues that the short-term debt is unfathomable and the long term debt even less sustainable (which is why the Dish supports Bowles-Simpson). But anyone not blinded by Ailes propaganda knows that these problems are long-standing. Here's a chart, via Fallows, from Chuck Spinney, that shows the direction of the debt under each consecutive president since the Second World War. Including Truman is a little unfair since he presided over demobilization. But the rest is telling:

What this doesn't convey, of course, is the impact of recessions, which would mitigate Reagan and Bush I a little. But what you see, I think, is the impact of supply side madness. Eisenhower managed to reduce the debt burden by almost 2 percent a year. George W "deficits don't matter" Bush managed to add 1.6 percent a year without a significant downturn. And yet for some reason, the public still associated the GOP with fiscal conservatism. This is quite simply the biggest mass delusion I've witnessed in the quarter of a century I've lived in America.