Month: October 2011

Brian X. Chen toys around with an iPhone 4S, and finds one more reason for one more person to be unemployed:

To give you an idea of how convenient Siri is, it takes about three seconds to create a reminder with a voice command, as opposed to the 10 seconds it takes me to manually type an event into a to-do list or calendar entry. Before, with the standard iPhone calendar, I would often forget to add an event because I was too busy to type it, and as a result I would forget I had something scheduled altogether. With Siri and Apple’s new Reminders to-do list app, it’s unlikely I’ll forget anything important again because the process is so effortless.

It’s kind of like having the unpaid intern of my dreams at my beck and call, organizing my life for me. I think Siri on the iPhone is a life changer, and this is only the beginning.

Douthat thinks Mitt is already running a general election campaign:

Romney’s domestic policy agenda is particularly impressive, but his economic messaging — that the rich are “doing just fine,” and we should worry more about the middle class and the uninsured — is very well-suited to a successful center-right general election campaign. If his rivals looked stronger, he might need to play more to “the poor should pay higher taxes and the uninsured should take care of themselves” strand within conservatism. But as it stands, the field’s weakness is letting him get away with rhetoric and positioning that should make the Obama White House very, very nervous.

Agreed. The perverse logic of such an awful field means Romney has more ideological room earlier than might otherwise have been expected.

One caveat from today's NBC poll from the GOP base. 67 percent want a nominee who shares their views, as opposed to only 31 percent who want the person likeliest to win against Obama. Hence what appears to be Romney's ceiling – around 23 percent – becoming the anti-Romney floor for others. Any other man would be a little embarrassed by this tepid level of support. But Romney seems capable of surviving any such humiliation. There must be just a slight clench of the stomach where, as Jon Stewart put it, his feelings used to be.

A SFW site that reviews the lesser appreciated props in online pornography. From the above scene:

A-level standard trigonometry. Maths all correct. Good pluralisation of 'formulae'. Neat handwriting. Loses a mark for 'Tan' instead of 'tan'. But otherwise: excellent work!  9/10

A tangentially-related email from April is worth re-posting:

I thought you should know that because of your weekly contest, I find myself examining all window shots for geographic clues. This includes friend's Facebook photos, but most disconcertingly, porn. It's astounding how much porn turns out to be posed on balconies, windowsills, or in front of windows. And now, more often than not, I find myself looking past shapely posteriors and well-formed bosoms to examine a unique cornice-piece, filigree, or church spire. 

Thanks, I think.

The Obama team is testing lines of attack:

David Axelrod held a midday conference call with reporters on Wednesday that was mostly focused on coming up with new ways of calling Mitt Romney a rudderless panderer without any fixed principles. He even went so far as to quote George Burns: “All you need to succeed in show business is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

John Sides expects Obama's 2012 run "to be hard-nosed and aggressively critical of the opponent." Not that this is new for Obama:

What percentage of Obama’s television advertising during the 2008 campaign included an attack on John McCain?  Well above 50%, according to research by the Wisconsin Advertising Project (pdf).  And what percentage of statements by Obama or Obama spokespeople that were reported in the New York Times contained attacks on McCain?  About 40%, according to the the book  Attack Politics by Emmett Buell and my former colleague and Monkey Cage contributor Lee Sigelman.  (The comparable figure for McCain was 50%.)  Now, according to Buell and Sigelman’s data, Obama’s campaign was less negative than many other past presidential campaigns, but it was hardly just hopey-changey.

Some commentators seem to assume or imply that Obama’s 2008 message of unity and bipartisanship meant that he didn’t “go negative” in the heat of that campaign.  He did.  And he will.

"MB" refers to Muslim Brotherhood.

"Romney is not a conservative. He's not, folks. You can argue with me all day long on that, but he isn't. … This isn't personal, not with what country faces and so forth. I like him very much. I've spent some social time with him. He's a fine guy. He's very nice gentleman. He is a gentleman. But he's not a conservative," – Rush Limbaugh. 

Mark Liberman pitch-tracked the president's weekly addresses: 

FDR had his weekly "Fireside chats", and in 1982 Ronald Reagan began the modern tradition of weekly presidential addresses, which U.S. presidents since then have maintained. I don't think that very many people actually listen to these things — no one that I've asked has ever admitted to regular consumption. But I've been collecting them since 2004, and listening to most of them, and a few days ago I noticed something. What I noticed is that president Obama seemed a mite testy in his weekly address for  10/1/2011 ("Fighting for the American Jobs Act"). This led me to ponder the phonetics of testiness, and of emotional expression in general.

Liberman found "an average pitch of 137.3 ±0.38 Hz on October 1, vs. an average of 106.6 ±0.31 Hz on August 6, for a proportional difference of about 29%."

A reader writes:

Ross Douthat apparently has a bad case of amnesia. We actually have empirical evidence on the question of whether congressional Dems would work with a GOP president to fix the economy. As the economy faltered in 2008, Bush asked the Democratically-controlled Congress to pass a number of economic measures. While Bush himself wasn't up for relection, Dems could have seen political hay in obstructing Bush, letting things tank, and then beat up on the GOP while doing nothing.

So what did the Dems do? In February of 2008, Congress passed a stimulus bill that included tax rebate checks – checks mailed with a prominent letter attributing them to President Bush, if I recall.

That measure passed with a majority of the Democrats supporting it, and a majority of Bush's own GOP *opposing* it! The same thing happened with the TARP bill in the fall of 2008; the Democrats were MORE supportive of Bush's emergency measures than the Republicans were. How can Ross possibly square that reality with a claim that just a few months later, in 2009, the Dems would have become utterly intransigent with John McCain replacing Bush?

Ross' hypothesis was tested in 2008, and it failed spectacularly.