Donald Trump's nonsense is beginning to pay off. He's within striking distance of Mitt Romney in New Hampshire:
If Trump actually run[s] 21% of New Hampshire GOP voters say they'd vote for him, compared to 27% for Romney. The key to Trump's relatively strong showing? He does well with birthers and Tea Partiers, two groups he has seemed to actively court with his public comments of late.
Dave Weigel adds that 21% '"might actually be as far as birtherism can take a candidate."
Eric de Place examines a new study (pdf):
Two big things stand out here for me: 1) white people remain somewhat over-represented; but 2) bicycling appears to be trending toward racial parity. As of 2009, roughly 21 percent of all bike trips in the US were made by people of color, and it looks as though US cyclists may soon look pretty darn similar to the nation as a whole.
He also compares income and finds that "contrary to popular convention, the biggest share of bicyclists isn't yuppies, it's low income people. In fact, the lowest-earning quarter of Americans make nearly one-third of all bike trips."
I have a bike and no car. And cars are the primary reason we are so indebted to foreign autocracies sitting on sand and oil. But Americans, as usual, don't want to give up their cars (often more than one in a family), and don't want to pay any gas taxes. Then they complain about wars in the Middle East. Driver, heal thyself.
Edward Glaeser cheers it:
Without this increasing diversity, America’s population would have been largely stagnant. Over the last 40 years, our country’s population has increased by 106 million people. Seventy-four percent of that increase, 78 million people, came from the growth of the minority population.
And the GOP weeps.
Annalee Newitz summarizes a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
A group of scientists used fMRI scans to study the brains of people dealing with being rejected, and compared them to the brains of people experiencing physical pain. They found that the exact same regions of the brain are involved in processing both experiences. For humans, social rejection is tantamount to literal injury.
And this helps explain why the psychological torture of human beings – their total isolation, threats to their families, mock executions and forced nudity is no less serious than the comic book variety. Which renders the role of psychologists in the Bush torture program all the more despicable.
This one has the feel of "Major Boobage":
Das Pop: The Game from Big Active on Vimeo.
Aaron Bady explains, in detail, why "Arianna Huffington is [NYT editor] Bill Keller’s Somali Pirate." It's a fantastic post that deserves to be read in full. Money quote:
The real problem, however, is that journalists are, by their nature, thieves of words. You can call it what you like; you can say “Possibly I am old-fashioned,” and talk about how “actual journalists are laboring at actual history, covering the fever of democracy in Arab capitals and the fever of austerity in American capitals” (Keller) or you can brag about the “148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism” (Huffington), but all this “old fashioned” stuff is just a way of covering over something really basic about what “actual” journalists “traditionally” do, all the time: write down what other people say.
They can exercise editorial discretion in how they integrate and harmonize the various quotes they‘ve aggregated. They can confirm, they can contextualize, and they can (very rarely) manage to witness something with their own two eyes. They can produce collages out of stolen scraps. And they should do these things. But at the core of the journalistic process is the act, inescapably, of taking other people’s texts, weaving them together, and then placing them under your byline (with appropriate citation) and profiting from the activity.
The more you talk about piracy, it seems to me, the more you bump into the uncomfortable fact that journalism is only distinguishable from word-piracy because, and to the extent that, we arbitrarily decide that it is.
Gregg Easterbook fears a Bloomberg candidacy:
Carter lost because a third-party vanity candidate, John Anderson, siphoned off liberal voters. The elder Bush lost because a third-party vanity candidate, Ross Perot, siphoned off conservative voters. Plus, in 2000, a third-party vanity candidate, Ralph Nader, threw the election to the younger Bush, away from Al Gore, who prevailed in the popular vote.
That’s three of the last seven presidential elections swung by third-party candidates who were in the race mainly as acts of self-flattery.
That last dig seems unfair to Perot to me. Yes he was a bit of a nutter, but his crusade against debt was what motivated him to get in. But I tend to agree with Steve Kornacki who believes the broader economic climate dwarfs the impact of three candidates:
With or without Perot in '92, Bush would have lost — just as Carter (running under similar condition) would have lost with or without Anderson in 1980. The same goes for Obama next year: A double-dip recession will probably doom him, whether he has one general election opponent or two. Conversely, if the economy continues to improve, there simply won't be room for a major third party candidate; and if a self-funding third party candidate like Bloomberg were to force the issue, it wouldn't be a threat to Obama, since swing voters will happily reelect a president they like if they perceive the economy to be on the rebound. This is why there was no room for an independent candidate when Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, and why Perot was unable to gain traction when he ran again in 1996.
Douthat admits there is "plenty in the [Paul Ryan] plan for liberals to hate, moderates to doubt, and conservatives to question" but he nevertheless sees it as an important gambit:
George W. Bush touched the third rail of American politics with his Social Security gambit, and lived to regret it. With their proposal to transform Medicare from an open-ended entitlement to a system that provides support for seniors’ premiums, Ryan and the Republicans are reaching out and grabbing it with both hands. In the process, they are being brutally honest with the American people, in ways that the Obama White House has repeatedly refused to be, about the scale of the deficit challenge and the scope of the reforms needed to address it.
I think the Ryan plan needs work along these lines. But I'm on Ross's side with this. Obama's running away from his own commission was, in my view, a mistake. But he does have a chance now to respond constructively to Ryan, especially since it seems likely the GOP will still control the House after 2012.
He finds a strange new nervousness among Republican elites – especially if the GOP forces a government shutdown or a refusal to increase the debt limit. Money quote:
Look no further than late February’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted by Democrat Peter Hart and Republican Bill McInturff… 75 percent of Republicans thought government was trying to do too much while 27 percent thought government should do more. But among independents, 51 percent thought government should do more, with 47 percent saying government was trying to do too much.
While those numbers among independents are effectively tied, they are a far cry from the 60-38 percent of independents who thought government was trying to do too much in the mid-October, preelection poll and a lot more like the numbers that existed in spring 2009, before Democratic prospects began to nosedive. That poll was conducted February 24-28 among 1,000 adults and has a 3-point error margin, larger among sub-groups.
Ackerman says it "is written with an Etch-a-Sketch." Michael Donley, secretary of the Air Force, estimated "that the war has cost the Air Force about $75 million so far, with expenses running to $4 million a day." That doesn't square with other guesstimates:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress last week that without a U.S. combat role in the Libya war, he expects the bill to run to $40 million per month. That doesn’t exactly match the Air Force’s tally. By Donley’s figures, if the Air Force slashed its costs for the war in half, it would still exceed Gates’ totals — and that’s not counting the Navy’s contribution.
Sadly, no one really counts the costs of these international welfare programs. Even as the GOP proposes slashing benefits for the poor and elderly. The two great flaws in Ryan's plan – no new revenues and no real cuts in defense – render it, to my mind, courageous but unjust. We should all bear the sacrifice for the war debt and the unaffordable tax cuts that are Bush's legacy.
The Dish 