Month: January 2012

Tina and I chat about my article and the presidential race:

Karl Smith asks. Kevin Drum guesses Romney would repeal Obamacare. Tyler Cowen differs:

I expect Romney to claim he has repealed ACA, but in fact he will change five aspects of the law and cement the rest of it in place, albeit in a less progressive manner and with lower Medicaid expenditures. (Outright repeal actually would not be easy, not to mention filibuster issues.) He knows he doesn’t have any other “right-wing health care plan” in his back pocket, won’t be willing to restore the status quo ex ante, and he will be willing to take the “Tea Party knock on the chin” very early on in his term, hoping to repair the fence later. Ultimately letting the issue fester doesn’t help him, and he is smart enough to realize that.

Lionel Richie gets some help from Hollywood:

S.W. at DiA points out that the Keystone rejection may well only be a temporary:

TransCanada can submit a new application for a similar pipeline following a new route, giving Mr Obama the respite he wanted while allowing him to bask in green adulation for now. The Republicans, for their part, can now make slightly stronger attack ads about Mr Obama's foot-dragging in the run-up to the election in November.

Alex Koppelman thinks along the same lines: 

[T]here’s a pattern to the Administration’s actions here—this isn’t the first important decision on the environment that it has pushed back until after the election.

They were bounced into a making a premature decision but they've allowed for it to be reviewed. Again, a perfectly sane, orderly approach.

Possibly:

[T]here is a difference between reading an article about Mrs Gingrich and watching her tell her story, in her own words, on network television, two days before a primary election. The conventional wisdom is that Mr Gingrich is already inoculated against the effects of damaging revelations about his personal life. He had better hope that wisdom holds.

Jessica Grose, on the other hand, expects the interview to have little impact:

Marianne's interview may even have a positive effect on South Carolina voters. They may see her as a bitter woman who's just attempting revenge-by-network news, and this may galvanize their wavering support for Newt. They may not even believe whatever Marianne has to say. Unless Marianne has photographic evidence of Newt drop kicking several puppies and then peeing on Ronald Reagan's headstone, I don't think the interview will make much of a difference.

John Cassidy suspects that the heavy news day will help Gingrich weather the storm:

The ex-wife bomb was going to explode in Newt’s face at some point, and Perry’s endorsement did a good job of relegating it to the second story of the day—or third if you count the news from Iowa. …Still, Newt is going to have to react to the ABC interview, and in a fuller manner than he did this morning, when, speaking on NBC, he criticized ABC News for “intruding into family things that are more than a decade old,” and adding, “I’m not going to say anything negative about Marianne.”

Fareed Zakaria's long interview with Obama is well worth a read. A bit from a back-and-forth on Bowles-Simpson: 

There’s no equivalence between Democratic and Republican positions when it comes to deficit reduction. We’ve shown ourselves to be serious. We’ve made a trillion dollars worth of cuts already. We’ve got another $1.5 trillion worth of cuts on the chopping blocks. But what we’ve also said is, in order for us to seriously reduce the deficit, then there’s got to be increased revenue. There’s no way of getting around it. It’s basic math. And if we can get any Republicans to show any serious commitment — not vague commitments, not “we’ll get revenues because of tax reform somewhere in the future, but we don’t know exactly what that looks like, and we can’t identify a single tax that we would allow to go up” — but if we can get any of them who are still in office, as opposed to retired, to commit to that, we’ll be able to reduce our deficit.

After the flurry of polls this morning, Nate Silver reassesses:

Mr. Gingrich has gained ground in the polls more than Mr. Romney has lost it. Two days ago, our forecast had Mr. Gingrich with 22.6 percent of the vote, so he has gained about 11 points since then. Meanwhile, Mr. Romney’s projection has declined less than 3 points — to 33.6 percent from 36.1 percent — over the same interval. Instead, most of Mr. Gingrich’s gains have come from Rick Santorum and Rick Perry (who today dropped his campaign and endorsed Mr. Gingrich), as well as from undecided voters.

Nope, says Chait: 

Romney’s run of luck during the Republican nominating race is beginning to defy belief. Begin with the fact that Rick Santorum turns out to have won the Iowa caucuses. Finding this out now is approximately 0.001 percent as valuable as having it announced the night of the caucuses. There was an old Fed Ex commercial depicting an aging pool cleaner suddenly discovering a 20-year-old acceptance letter from Harvard he had never received, and imagining the life he could have had. That man is Santorum. He has to wonder if the Iowa vote counters were gay.

Heh. But here's the thing. If Romney loses South Carolina to Gingrich in a nail-biter, and Santorum won Iowa, you have a state for each candidate to brag about. Instead of a clean sweep and inevitability, Romney becomes one of three winners, with his underwhleming margin in what amounts to his home state. And the press will do anything to keep this alive.

My debate with Bay Buchanan on Obama's record in AC360 last night is below. So great to have a dialogue about the facts and interpretations with a Romney backer. But to have a real debate about Obama's record, which provides the best defense of him, is not allowed on Fox.

I knew from afar that they were a propaganda channel. Now, in this close-up personal interaction, you realize just how deep the rot goes. This is a channel dedicated to money, power and entertainment, in that order. But here's what they're missing; and what they're terrified of: