Month: January 2012

There's a reason Mitt Romney has shifted his rhetoric recently on Obama's economic record. He hasn't dropped the absurd line that Obama has made the recession worse. But he has firmly conceded that the economy is getting better. Money quote:

INGRAHAM: You’ve also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the president’s argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying it’s getting better?

ROMNEY: Well, of course it’s getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession, there is always a recovery. […]

INGRAHAM: Isn’t it a hard argument to make if you’re saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, he took a bunch of steps to try to turn the economy around, and now, we’re seeing more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn’t that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?

ROMNEY: Have you got a better one, Laura? It just happens to be the truth.

And although some will see this as a huge self-inflicted wound, I think it's actually smart. To run for president denying the core economic reality you're in is to build your house on quicksand. But Ingraham is dead right as well. It's much harder to beat a first term president during an economic recovery – especially when the worst of the recession occurred just before he got into office, and the rest of the world is doing much worse.

But look at the data above. People are changing their minds about the direction of the country. At its peak, the wrong/right direction gap was at 56 percent. A few months later, it's narrowed to 33. The Dish noticed this a while back, but the trend has only intensified. If it continues on its current trajectory (unlikely but possible), he could run for re-election with more people thinking the country is going in the right direction than the wrong one.

Obama has the wind at his back. Well, a mild breeze, anyway.

Silver says Gingrich has probably peaked. Rassmussen's latest gives Romney an eight point lead. Ed Morrissey analyzes:

That’s a ten-point drop for Gingrich since Sunday’s survey, and a seven-point gain for Romney.  The momentum of the debate performance, and perhaps the renewed aggression on the campaign trail for Romney, seems to be firmly established in new polling.  That makes tonight a must-win evening for Gingrich, and that probably means a lot of bloody knuckles for both men.

And we'll get applause as well! Yay!

Hanne Blank traces the word to its origin:

“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19th century], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing.

Pandering to voters in Florida yesterday, Newt announced his intent to build a lunar base: "When they have 13,000 Americans living on the moon, they can petition to become a state." Noreen Malone smirks:

In case you read that (which, by the way, Newt says will happen by the end of his second term) and thought, I mean, dude, we just shut down our shuttle program. Do you know how much money that will cost? Aren't you supposed to be the tea party's guy? And don't we have some problems with the way things are going these days on Earth? …. well, Newt has an answer for you, ye of little faith. " I accept the charge that I am an American, and Americans instinctively are grandiose." Who's on his speech-writing team, Saul Bellow and Buzz Lightyear?

Weigel thinks the ploy is savvy:

Gingrich proposed it in his 1984 futurist manifesto Window of Opportunity, published during his third term in the House. In a classic Gingrichian touch, the moon colony's statehood would be made possible by a "Northwest Ordinance for Space." His "space sex" theorizing and space mirror mathematics got more attention, but the moon idea; that was the big one. He's never backed down from it. Why would he? Why would he do it in Florida? We call this chunk of the state the "space coast" for a reason, ably explained by Paul Barrett in a great 2010 piece about the local recession.

Jim Newell looks ahead:

What about Mars? "Gingrich also said he would push to develop propulsion technology that would get man to Mars." He would merely "develop" the project. Such a cop-out.

Evgeny Morozov explains:

While the anti-vaccination movement itself is not new—religious concerns about vaccination date back to the early 18th century—the ease of self-publishing and search afforded by the Internet along with a growing skeptical stance towards scientific expertise—has given the anti-vaccination movement a significant boost. Thus, Jenny McCarthy, an actress who has become the public face of the anti-vaccination movement, boasts that much of her knowledge about the harms of vaccination comes from "the university of Google.” She regularly shares her "knowledge" about vaccination with her nearly half-million Twitter followers. This is the kind of online influence that Nobel Prize-winning scientists can only dream of; Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous working scientist, has only 300,000 Twitter followers.

Paul M. Davis married a bisexual woman who later came out as gay:

Today, I live in a two-bedroom bungalow with Wimbledon [the cat]. I work from home, talk to my cat like he’s a person, and have the physical and emotional space to process the past six years and figure out what it means to face down the second half of my 30s as a single person. This year, I hosted Christmas dinner with Daria, her girlfriend, and our closest friends. It’s a strange family we’re building here, but it's the best one I could ask for. That night, as I looked out at my guests from the kitchen, I realized the wedding photographer was right: We did stay together.

Amitai Etzioni offers some perspective: 

There are different assessments about the scope of Chinese military modernization and the country’s intentions; however, there is little doubt that China notes America’s six-fold budget advantage on defense. The United States maintains a stockpile of 5,113 nuclear active and inactive warheads. China has about 250. The United States has eleven aircraft carriers; China has one. Moreover, China’s military has little battle experience. And China’s history contains many chapters of occupation by foreign powers bringing great suffering. In short, China sees itself as weak and vulnerable.

At the same time, China is proud of its recent economic growth and sensitive to outside criticism and pressure. Hence military moves that command the attention of a much stronger, longer-established power reverberate strongly in Beijing. More of these moves are likely to push China to accelerate its military buildup and become less cooperative with the West. Indeed, they could quite readily lead to the kind of vicious cycle of which psychologists have long warned, in which the perceived threats of one nation lead the other to respond, leading the first to feel its fears have been validated, and so on—ultimately resulting in an arms race, if not in war.

Contra Lynch and El Amrani, Anne-Marie Slaughter believes it's time to start talking about an intervention in Syria:

Openly raising the possibility of armed intervention does not mean that intervention is bound to occur. Much of the diplomatic activity to date has been aimed at getting Assad's supporters — particularly the Sunni business community of Damascus and Aleppo — to rethink their allegiances. It is a game of perceptions and assumptions, whereby the international community has tried to make Assad's fall seem inevitable and Assad himself has made clear that he will not be cowed into leaving or making real concessions.

Injecting the possibility of armed intervention to protect opposition protesters into this mix, with the accompanying prospect of a much longer and much more destructive conflict in which more members of the military could defect to the Free Syrian Army, could tip this domestic political balance in favor of a negotiated deal and put real internal pressure on Assad. It is still true, however, that the credible threat of force requires an actual willingness to make good on that threat. 

Daniel Solomon complicates Slaughter's case.

(Video: Protestors in Hama chant "we want a no fly zone" and other pro-intervention slogans.)

Jack Shafer watches as the Republican candidates shower praise upon the 1950s:

If the campaign were simply about marketing 1950s nostalgia, Santorum would be leading the polls. More than any other candidate, he yearns for the decade he was barely born into (b. 1958), when the Mass was in Latin, blue laws were the rule and not the exception, and abortion was back-alley or required a plane ride. Alone among the candidates, Santorum would self-deport into the Pleasantville mise-en-scène if the movie’s cinematic magic were real.

Romney's Super PAC mocks Gingrich for exaggerating his ties to Reagan: 

 Restore Our Future is also targeting Newt's electability:

Romney takes the Freddie Mac line to one of the hardest hit states in the housing crash: 

Romney has now opened up a 15-point lead over Gingrich among Latino voters in Florida. The latest Spanish-language ad from Mitt's camp here. From a translation: 

And Reagan definitely would have never offended us, Hispanics, as Gingrich did by saying that Spanish is the language of the ghetto.

As per Senator Marco Rubio's denunciation, Newt is now pulling a radio spot that accused Romney of being "anti-immigrant." Meanwhile, the Democratic group American Bridge takes aim at Romney on immigration: 

Alex Burns is impressed: 

The last few days have been a vivid illustration of the research and preparedness gap between Romney and his intra-party rivals. The former Massachusetts governor has delivered a detailed, information-rich attack on Gingrich – some of it easily rebuttable for candidates with full-scale research operations. That won’t be the case in the general election, as the Bridge memo makes clear.

Here's the DNC's insta-ad on Romney's tax returns: 

Steve Benen provides some context:

According to the former governor’s aides, Romney had $3 million in his Swiss account, held at UBS. Brad Malt, who helps oversee Romney’s investments, said told reporters yesterday, “It was a bank account, nothing more and nothing less.” Not surprisingly, there are additional questions about why, exactly, Romney had $3 million stashed in Switzerland.

Martin Sullivan, contributing editor of Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan research organization, said he was surprised Romney had a Swiss bank account since such accounts were sometimes used to hide assets. “Why would somebody who knows he’s going to be so visible screw around with a Swiss account?”

Brian Beutler has more.