Month: March 2012

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

Here it is:

"[Santorum]'s brought contraception into this campaign. The issue of birth control — contraception, Blunt-Rubio — is being debated, I believe, later this week. It deals with banning or allowing employers to ban providing female contraception. Have you taken a position on it? [Santorum] said he was for that. We'll talk about personhood in a second, but he's for that. Have you taken a position?"

Romney said he was against "the bill" but subsequently said

"I thought he was talking about some state law that prevented people from getting contraception …"

and then said he backed Blunt-Rubio, a law that would allow employers to micro-manage their healthcare coverage for moral reasons, i.e. restricting contraception. To be honest, I think the question is pretty clear. The interviewer referred directly to Blunt-Rubio. And Romney has used this kind of technique before. Remember this in Ohio:

A day after he refused to endorse an Ohio ballot measure that limits public employee union rights, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said today that he is “110 percent” behind the effort … “I know there are other ballot questions in Ohio. I wasn’t taking a position on those."

So he misunderstood or misspoke again. The trouble is this always seems to happen in one direction. His first position is more moderate than his subsequent one. In other words, his gaffes may be true gaffes: they are what he actually believes, which is why he must then explain them away.

One wonders: can Romney go a day without putting his foot in it? Or do Republicans have to get used to this?

There were few taboos or grudges or feuds or pointless partisan fooferaws that Andrew Breitbart didn't leap into; and so one can imagine his own glee/fury at the following Breitbartian headline:

Liberals Celebrate Death Of Andrew Breitbart

Nonetheless, the content of some of those tweets reveal something quite rotten. A man has died at a painfully early age. He has family and friends and colleagues. They are in grief. Yes, he was a public figure, who doled it out relentlessly. But his family is human. We can too easily forget they exist.

This email, forwarded by a District Judge, tells you all you need to know:

"Normally I don't send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine.

"A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?'" the email joke reads. "His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"

What strikes me is not the hideous joke – but the sarcastic premise that it "touched his heart". Try to get your head around that for a minute. The suggestion that the president was conceived in a mass gang-bang of a white woman that included animals "touched his heart." He pretended to find it moving and poignant.

Noah Millman weighs in on the debate:

The easiest way to defend the proposition on the grounds of freedom isn’t to say that pro-natal policies lead to economic growth, but to say that the decision to have children is a profoundly important one for many people, a life-defining choice, and that it is also an economically burdensome one. It’s very simple redistribution, no different, in principle, from the progressive income tax, but it’s a redistribution scheme that accounts for the fact that some decisions are more fundamental than others.

Relatedly, Kevin Drum points out that increases in child tax subsidies haven't goosed the fertility rate.

The former Miss America judge shares his thoughts on Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown student who eventually testified on contraception:

What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. … Ok, so she's not a slut. She's round-heeled.

"'Round-heeled' is an old-fashioned term for promiscuity," notes Jack Mirkenson. Then Limbaugh takes a shot at Danica Patrick, the female NASCAR star. Another of his greatest hits here. Some Democratic female members of Congress are finally asking Republicans to distance themselves from this remark by their ideological leader:

Limbaugh's attacks, the Democrats said, "are outside the circle of civilized discussion and …  unmask the strong disrespect for women held by some in this country … We call upon the Republican leaders in the House to condemn these vicious attacks on Ms. Fluke, which are in response to her testimony to the Congress."

Good luck with that.

The incendiary media innovator and pop music lover is dead at 43 from natural causes. It's a stunner. He was on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday in fine form. Sincere condolences to his family and friends and co-workers. The kind of high stakes in-the-arena 24/7 blogging lifestyle is not always easy on the body or soul. We were often at crossed swords online but tried not to make it personal. We spent the last time we were together sharing favorite pop music on our iPhones on an airplane. He sure seemed to be enjoying life at the time.

Before setting up healthcare exchanges, which are mandated by Obamacare, many states are waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will strike down the law. Dave Chandra warns that "delaying a decision on whether to establish a state exchange until the summer could effectively be a decision to let the federal government set up the exchange":

It’s hard to imagine how a state could take all the necessary legislative, policy, operational, and IT system development steps needed to meet this compressed timeline if it doesn’t start work until the summer.

Mark Bittman believes not: 

The argument for limiting the use of food stamps to actual food is consistent with established policy. They’re already disallowed for tobacco, alcohol, vitamins, pet foods, household supplies and (with some exceptions) food meant to be eaten on premises. Payments have been based on the cost of a "nutritionally adequate diet." Let me state the obvious: there is no nutritional need for foods with added sugar.

Jacob Sullum cries nannyism:

Notice that [Bittman] asks whether such meddling is "necessary," not whether it is legitimate, and even then does not answer the question. Instead Bittman suggests that people are addicted to sugar, which he thinks means they have no choice but to consume it and therefore must be rescued from this self-destructive habit by benign overseers like him. That is how he imagines the government is "on our side" when it uses force to stop us from eating what we want to eat. 

Earlier discussion of whether to regulate sugar intake here and here.