Month: December 2011

Supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney listen as he speaks during a campaign stop in Muscatine, Iowa, on December 28, 2011. Romney fiercely mocked President Barack Obama as Republicans blitzed Iowa, a week before the first votes of the 2012 White House race are cast in the US state's fabled caucuses. Longtime national front-runner Romney launched a three-day bus tour after his campaign's barrage of negative advertising appeared to slow a surge by former House speaker Newt Gingrich. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.

McArdle encourages thriftiness:

If you're not saving enough–and you know who you are–don't decide today that you're going to save 15%, and then forget about it tomorrow when you realize how daunting a task that will be.  Instead, try this: divert an extra 5% of your income into a 401(k), IRA, or other tax-advantaged savings plan.  If your 401(k) is stuffed but you don't have much of an emergency fund–or if, for some reason, you don't qualify for tax-advantaged savings–have 7% of every paycheck diverted to a bank account which isn't linked to your other accounts.  It's a slow week at work, the perfect time to fuss with HR paperwork.

Follow-up on where to save here.

A nine-year-old asks the candidates an important question:

"If I finish dead last in the mix I'll go home but I don't think that's going to happen," – Rick Santorum. "Mix". Heh.

Listen to this:

I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American.

It is not just un-American but indecent, to support an end to the war on drugs, a drastic retrenchment of an over-stretched military, and a war on government spending? Then a lie thrown in for good measure:

When asked if he would be able to vote for Paul if his rival won the 2012 GOP nomination, Gingrich said unequivocally "No." "I think it's very difficult to see how you would engage in dealing with Ron Paul as a nominee," Gingrich said. "Given the newsletters, which he has not yet disowned. He would have to go a long way to explain himself and I think it would be very difficult to see today, Ron Paul as the Republican nominee."

Paul has disowned and disavowed the contents of the newsletters on many occasions. That may be an insufficient explanation, but it is not as Gingrich has asserted.

CNN and Time have a new Iowa poll finding Romney at 25 percent and Paul at 22 percent. The most unexpected result:

[T]he biggest beneficiary of Gingrich’s collapse appears to be former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who’s rocketed into third place with 16%, a dramatic 11-point climb in three short weeks. Santorum now leads among born-again Christians, and is tied with Paul and Romney among self-described conservatives and Tea Party supporters. The surge by Santorum, who’s quietly made stops in each of Iowa’s 99 counties and won the endorsement of some of the state’s top evangelical leaders, only adds suspense to next week’s caucuses, the outcome of which remains incredibly unpredictable.

Erick Erickson isn't happy:

Rick Santorum will not be the nominee. That’s the reality. But his rise hurts Bachmann, Gingrich, and Perry in Iowa — all of whom have better organizations and better shots beyond Iowa.

Infectious:

Their journey ends in China, where they're made into slipper soles, among other things:

To be sure, it's possible to shred wire in the United States. But unlike China, where there are plenty of manufacturers eager to buy large volumes of rubber and plastic insulation, the United States lacks such industrial demand, forcing U.S. recyclers to either landfill insulation or sell it to power plants as fuel. But the lack of a U.S. market for chopped plastic and mixed chopped copper and brass creates a counter-intuitive (for American environmentalists, at least) result: not only do Chinese recyclers recover more material from Christmas tree lights than Americans, they make more money, too. After all, they can sell the insulation, not pay for its interment.

“Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” – governor Rick Perry.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Jonathan Bernstein argues that the newsletters could still do Paul damage:

[T]his sounds to me a little like all of the people who were claiming a week into the anti-Newt onslaught that he was immune to attacks for whatever reasons. It's very possible that it just will take a bit of time to sink in.

But against the force of ads like the one above, there may not be enough time yet. Gingrich and Santorum have attacked Paul – but on foreign policy, not frontally on the newsletters.