Month: November 2011

Douthat likes Huntsman but thinks his campaign has been mismanaged:

[Huntsman] picked high-profile fights on two hot-button issues — evolution and global warming — that were completely irrelevant to his candidacy’s rationale. He let his campaign manager define his candidacy as a fight to save the Republican Party from a “bunch of cranks.” And he embraced his identity as the media’s favorite Republican by letting the liberal journalist Jacob Weisberg write a fawning profile for Vogue.

This was political malpractice at its worst. Voters don’t necessarily need to like a candidate to vote for him, but they need to think that he likes them. 

One reason for hope: Huntsman's New Hampshire polling is improving. Even nationally, he has crept up a teensy bit. I doubt he can win the nomination of a religious movement, since he is not running as a religious candidate (Romney's and Paul's problem too). But a decent showing might be a way to start the effort to drag the GOP back to secular politics and away from religious identity formation.

"No. There's enough places for blowhards like me to flap their gums," – Dish reader Kevin Baisch, responding to our Facebook question, "Should the Dish have a comments section?"

More commentary here. Related AAA video here.

Is much more retrograde than Perry's:

Gingrich preserves deductions for corporations and rich individuals that Perry eliminates: He preserve deductions for charitable giving and mortgage interest to all Americans, whereas Perry only keeps them for families earning less than $500,000. Perry vows to eliminate all corporate tax deductions, while Gingrich would preserve them. As such, corporations and the richest Americans could stand to benefit even more under Gingrich’s plan than Perry’s.

Christopher J. Conover breaks down healthcare spending:

The 1 percent of the population that has the highest annual health expenses accounts for one-fifth of health spending (figure 12.1a). Their annual spending in 2011 likely exceeded $115,000. (These figures exclude those institutionalized in nursing homes and long-term mental hospitals; their inclusion would drive these figures even higher).

Those in the top 5 percent account for just under half of all spending, with average annual expenditures that exceed $50,000. With the average U.S. worker earning less than $45,000 a year, these numbers demonstrate the desirability of some kind of health insurance coverage. Few but the wealthiest families are in a position to self-insure spending at these amounts. It would be only a slight exaggeration to observe that only the 1 percent could comfortably afford to be in the health spending 1 percent.

At the other end of the distribution, individuals in the bottom half of spending account for only 3 percent of annual health costs. Their average annual spending is less than $360. 

He proposes "having a Republican presidential candidate debate on this issue alone." I wonder how much of the cost for the top 1 percent in costs is spent in the last few days or weeks of life.

Ed Kilgore explains: 

[I]t is truly a sign of the times that the angle of attack most are choosing is Newt’s recent position on immigration. We have been monotonously told that this election is about the economy and the federal budget, not social issues, and in any event Republicans understand the general election risk of alienating Hispanic voters. But with the smoking ruins of Rick Perry’s candidacy still on display, it’s far past time to reassess both of those assumptions: Immigration remains a key issue to millions of Republican caucus and primary voters—in spite of, not because of, the economy—and they will not accept candidates taking the “wrong” position on the matter for the sake of electability. 

A reader writes:

The most despicable thing to me about Herman Cain – other than that he's Herman Cain – is that he put his wife on TV. How much Gloria knew or didn't know, how much she went along with or privately grieved over, we'll likely never know. But we do know that that man put that woman on TV to defend his reputation. The mother of his children. And she backed out of the TV appearance the first time, obviously not wanting to do it.

Of all the things that these serial philanderers do that makes me queasy, it's when they shield themselves with their wife or force her to stand alongside them sharing their disgrace while the cameras click. It's loathsome.

Oh and by the way, the statement from his lawyer- "The public's right to know and the media's right to report has boundaries and most certainly those boundaries end outside of one's bedroom door" – is pretty despicable in its own right. I agree that that's the way it should be, but it's pretty hard to stomach considering that Herman is with the party that does everything but park their slippers in other people's bedrooms so they can dictate what goes on there. Since when do Republicans believe in privacy?

Is there a consensus among the experts on this? Well, one place you might look is the American Psychological Association's 1995 report on "Intelligence: Knowns And Unknowns," written in response to the Bell Curve. The Wiki page is here. Money quote:

"There was a long-standing 15 point or 1 SD difference between the intelligence test scores of African Americans and White Americans, though it might have narrowed slightly in recent years. The difference was largest on those tests, verbal or non-verbal, that best represented the general intelligence factor (g). Controlled studies of the way the tests were formulated and administered had shown that this did not contribute substantially to the difference. Attempts to devise tests that would minimize disadvantages of this kind had been unsuccessful. The scores predicted future achievement equally well for blacks and whites.

The cause of that differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves. The Flynn effect shows that environmental factors can produce differences of at least this magnitude, but that effect is mysterious in its own right. Several culturally based explanations of the Black/ White IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available."

So the consensus is: we don't really know why this gap exists but it does and it's persistent. It's not the only group difference:

Males do better on visual-spatial tasks, with a particularly large difference on mental rotation (nearly 1 SD), which is significant for their generally better performance in tasks that involve aiming and throwing. Males also do relatively better on on tests of proportional and mechanical reasoning as well as on mathematics. Females do better on verbal tests and some memory tests. They do relatively better in tests of literature, English composition, Spanish, reading, and spelling. More males have dyslexia and stuttering.

Here, the role of testosterone is crucial. And I got into trouble with writing the obvious truth that men and women are biologically different as well. Look: I'm not trying to stir stuff up for its own sake. But I believe conservatism is about facing reality. And that means we should have unfettered research into reality. Especially when we don't know why an obvious social fact exists. A reader writes:

I'd like to point out that the left's position on this issue is not really comparable with the right's position on climate change. There are real problems with the genetic interpretation of the very real race difference in IQ scores. There are also real problems with 100% environmental interpretation of the very real race difference in IQ scores. The only indefensible position to have at this moment in time is that there aren't real differences in IQ scores.

Joel Wing checks in on the country's mismanaged economy:

Iraq has the potential to become an oil superpower. It is expanding and repairing its petroleum infrastructure, and plans on bringing in more foreign companies next year. That would seem to be beneficial for the country, and offer wealth to the entire nation. Instead, the boost in the petroleum industry will enrich the government, which has proven incapable of managing its funds. More useless government jobs will be created, more large development projects will be announced with many failing to come to fruition, and there will be even less reason for the authorities to push the private sector.

Dahlia Lithwick reviews the voting record of the newest justice:

Kagan voted with the Court’s conservative bloc in a case concerning a grandmother convicted of shaking a baby to death. The appeals court freed the grandmother, finding the jury’s conclusion irrational. Kagan broke with the left wing of the Court and silently joined the conservative majority in an unsigned opinion reversing the decision.

Kagan may prove more conservative than her predecessor Stevens, or this can be an outlier. Either way, the justice isn’t talking. That’s a rather conservative quality, and it’s generally the Court’s conservatives who speak reverently of judicial restraint and humility. While some may find her close-to-the-vest behavior a strategy in itself, it might instead be proof that Kagan is a purist. One with a real commitment to the fundamental purpose of the Court: to weigh each case independently and impartially.