Month: January 2012

The Real Not-Romney

Peter Suderman explains Paul's success:

[O]ne thing you can say about Paul is that he is not offering anything that could be described as conventional Republicanism; his campaign is built on opposition to defense spending and overseas adventurism, a critique of the Federal Reserve, and a return to constitutionally limited government. Compare this to the shrugging acceptance with which Romney’s vanilla campaign and laundry list of GOP priorities have been greeted; Paul, in contrast, has managed to generate tremendous, unusual enthusiasm. Indeed, he’s the only candidate in the race who has been able to sustain and build such enthusiasm over time. Who knew? The most effective anti-Romney turns out to be someone who is genuinely not like Mitt Romney. 

Massie builds on this thought:

[Paul] is, whatever his shortcomings, the purest rejection of Bushian conservatism available to voters this time around. Moreover, there's a touch of Howard Beale about Paul and the Paulites. They're mad as hell and unwilling to take it any longer.

Wall Street Isn’t Winning Popularity Contests

Kristol defends his concerns about Romney's record at Bain, insisting that the "2010 GOP majority was anti-Wall Street as well as anti-Washington": 

Romney, if he's to be the nominee, will have to do more than smugly dismiss concerns about aspects of modern finance as simply an assault on free markets. It will be fun for the Romney campaign over the next few days being defended by conservatives and free marketers against Newt's assaults. It was fun in 1992, when I was in the Bush White House, having our allies ridicule arguments, first by Pat Buchanan and then by Perot, as silly and uninformed. It wasn't so much fun losing a few months later.

Aaron Goldstein focuses on South Carolina: 

If Newt & Perry's criticisms of Romney (and for that matter Huckabee's) are anathema to Reagan conservatism then Romney should have no problem winning South Carolina in ten days time. But South Carolina's current unemployment rate is 9.9%. Granted the unemployment rate fell by 0.6% in November, the state's largest monthly drop in 35 years. But that's still far higher than Iowa's unemployment rate of 5.7% and New Hampshire's unemployment rate of 5.2%. If Romney can convince South Carolinians he can bring about prosperity then he can win. But Romney won't win if they believe he will bring them pink slips.

NYT Fail, Ctd

Many readers have written to dispute the notion that a targeted car bomb assassination amounts to "terrorism." I take one point: this was not an indiscriminate killing, although it does seem designed to sow fear among any scientists working on Iran's nuclear program, if not the general public. An assassination seems more appropriate. But my response was to the optics as well: the shattered car on the street, the dead victim inside covered in blood, etc. This wasn't a sleek hotel room silencer murder. It was a very public death. But here is the US legal definition of "terrorism" (18 U.S.C. s. 2331 ) [PDF]:

(1) the term “international terrorism” means activities that—

      (A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
      (B) appear to be intended—

           (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
           (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
           (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

      (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.

My italics. An assassination to affect the conduct or influence the policy of Iran would therefore legally be terrorism. Right? But if it isn't designed to affect Iran's policy, but merely to kill its scientists, merely to slow down nuclear research, then this may be a better definition:

the term “act of war” means any act occurring in the course of—

      (A) declared war;
      (B) armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or

      (C) armed conflict between military forces of any origin.

A third alternative is that this is an attempt to bait Iran, at a moment of high tension, into retaliation, in order to launch an overt war. I don't know. I don't even know who authorized this. But whoever is throwing matches into this dry brushwood is playing with fire. And the fire would consume the US and Europe as well as the Middle East.

Short-Changing The Tax Man

The tax gap – the difference between what Americans owe in taxes and what they voluntarily pay – is growing. In response, Bruce Bartlett berates Republicans for neutering the IRS:

Someone who thinks the odds of being caught are close to zero is going to be strongly tempted to cheat no matter how low tax rates are. Republicans have been treating the I.R.S. like a political punching bag for years, cutting its personnel and restricting its ability to do its job. The number of I.R.S. employees fell to 84,711 in 2010 from 116,673 in 1992 despite an increase in the population of the United States of 53 million over that period.

The Economist graphs the gap.

Carrying A Baby, Always

A fascinating phenomenon:

During pregnancy, cells sneak across the placenta in both directions. The fetus’s cells enter his mother, and the mother’s cells enter the fetus. A baby’s cells are detectable in his mother’s bloodstream as early as four weeks after conception, and a mother’s cells are detectable in her fetus by week 13. In the first trimester, one out of every fifty thousand cells in her body are from her baby-to-be (this is how some noninvasive prenatal tests check for genetic disorders). In the second and third trimesters, the count is up to one out of every thousand maternal cells. At the end of the pregnancy, up to 6 percent of the DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood plasma comes from the fetus. After birth, the mother’s fetal cell count plummets, but some stick around for the long haul. Those lingerers create their own lineages. Imagine colonies in the motherland.

Moms usually tolerate the invasion. This is why skin, organ, and bone marrow transplants between mother and child have a much higher success rate than between father and child.