Guinness gets in the St. Patrick's Day spirit:
Copyranter comments:
It's like a Monty Python skit, without the CRAZY (though I love those skits, too). Round up your mates—wonderful. That sheep dog is a hero! Are you watching, Miller Lite? This is how to do "Man Up" without banging men over the head with an idiot hammer.
Jim Antle assesses what's next for the scrappy libertarian:
Paul's caucus strategy for delegate maximization clearly isn't panning out as hoped (even granting the Paul campaign's contention that conventional counts are missing a lot of the delegates they are picking up behind the scenes). Given Paul's improved numbers almost everywhere, one wonders in retrospect if they might have been better served by trying to gain momentum by running up their popular vote in key contests.
What happened in Virginia is nevertheless a pretty good example of what might have been for Paul: he was able to pull a sizeable anti-Romney vote.
As the second-best campaign organization, it was not unreasonable to assume a Romney-Paul race at some point, and perhaps one will still occur while a significant bloc of delegates remains at stake. But super PACs and Gingrich's ego have kept other non-Romneys with higher mainstream movement profiles and less divergent foreign policy views in the mix much longer. Still, don't expect Paul to drop out before the others do.
Grace Wyler adds:
Sources close to the campaign tell Business Insider that there is growing pressure, internally and from supporters/donors, to start delivering tangible victories. But Super Tuesday was not all bad for Paul, with the Texas Congressman pulling off surprisingly strong second-place finishes in Vermont and Virginia, Romney strongholds in which Paul succeeded in winning over a significant number of independent voters.
Earlier coverage of Paul's long game here.
Hertzberg doesn't buy Obama's answer on gas prices:
It’s understandable that [Obama] feels he can’t say what I assume he believes: that gas prices should go up—and that the difference between three dollars a gallon and six or seven or eight dollars a gallon should go to the American people and their government, not to the oil kingdoms, the oil dictatorships, and the oil companies. The sensible, if at present unachievable, solution would be (a) to impose a whopping great gasoline tax, as part of a whopping great tax on all carbon-dioxide-emitting fossil fuels, and (b) to rebate the proceeds to the American people and the American economy by cutting or eliminating the payroll tax.
Along the same lines, Ryan Avent's interest is piqued by a paper suggesting that higher gas taxes change consumer behavior more than gas price increases due to market forces. Jared Bernstein, also writing about the politics of oil, points out that the US can't set global oil prices:
The United States holds only a couple of percent of known global oil reserves, and we produce less than 10% of total crude. These are binding constraints that no president can change. I’m not suggesting that our domestic production has no effect on prices. But oil is a global commodity and most of it is under the land of other countries. Our contribution to supply will always be a drop in the bucket and will thus generally be a matter of cents on the gallon, not dollars.
Relatedly, Brad Plumer shines light on the oil speculation boogyman.
A reader writes:
As a Catholic (though lapsed and liberal), I can't say I am shocked that Santorum lost the Catholic vote first in Michigan, and now Ohio. I can't quantify this, but I think there's an excellent point to be made that Catholics may think Santorum is doing his best to eradicate the hard work JFK did in overcoming the prejudices Al Smith faced when running for President. Yes, some families remember. It was passed down, particularly among Irish Americans (ask Pat Buchanan or Chris Matthews for their impressions, at this point they may be the institutional memory of Irish Catholic politics).
But as much new progress Catholicism has made in public opinion, the underlying bias against a Catholic President for fear of his being controlled by Rome has not vanished.
When it is convenient for the mainline Protestant and even conservative Evangelicals to bring up as a point on why they can't support Catholics, Santorum will then be exhibit A. Gary Wills description of him as a "Papist", is, I think, dead on in that respect. And I think that many Catholics are smart enough to realize that's the last thing we need in a political leader.
There is a reason why the Catholic politicians who have truly flourished have been the Democrats: the split on social issues makes clear they will not be beholden to Rome. Similarly, to the extent Romney is perceived (wrongly, as far as I can tell) as a less doctrinaire Mormon, Catholics may sympathize with the prejudice against faith he needs to overcome.
(Hat tip: Nerdcore)
"The American-Israeli relationship now resembles the sort of crazy co-dependency one sometimes finds in doomed marriages, where the more stubborn and unstable partner drags the other into increasingly delusional and dangerous projects whose disastrous results seem only to legitimate their paranoid outlook. If Mr Netanyahu manages to convince America to back an attack on Iran, it is to be hoped that the catastrophic consequences will not be used to justify the attack that led to them," – Matt Steinglass, The Economist.
Heh.
His latest policies promise to cut federal spending by 20 percent in four years – without any defense cuts and with tax rate cuts alongside cutting unspecified deductions. This is austerity with a punch – along European lines. The trouble is: we have a real time experiment in how austerity in a depression doesn't reduce debt but increases it:
Europe is choking off its own recovery by insisting on premature austerity. The first mistake was to agree on unrealistically tough deficit-reduction targets. The second mistake was—rather, is—to insist on compliance with those targets even though they are doing serious damage to Europe’s economy…
Europe’s most indebted countries don’t have the financial wherewithal to stimulate their economies, but creditor nations such as Germany do. Instead, they are joining in the austerity—compounding the problem instead of alleviating it. Germany managed to slash its budget deficit to 1 percent of GDP last year.
No country can run big budget deficits forever. But by aiming for fiscal rectitude when the economy is weak, Europe is causing an economic contraction that depresses tax revenue, forcing governments to cut spending even further in a lethal downward spiral.
I believe in serious cuts to defense and entitlements, alongside Bowles-Simpson scale tax reform and revenue enhancement, as the way to get back to fiscal sanity. But I am sane enough to realize that doing that two years ago would have been counter-productive. A depression is the one time you can allow spending to increase without worrying about debt. Europe is proving this. When do you shift gears? Only when the recovery is well under way – and even then, backloading serious entitlement cuts makes the most sense. But Romney seems to be doubling down on the European model, not the American one – as a way to cement his fiscal conservatism with the base. It doesn't reduce the debt; it can actually increase it.
Reykjavik, Iceland, 1.34 pm
Kornacki thinks Limbaugh walked right into it:
The specific threat to Republicans involves a very specific type of voter: the unmarried woman. In 2008, Barack Obama beat John McCain by 41 points among single women, and John Kerry’s 2004 margin over Bush was 25 percent. This is where the gender gap that we hear about every four years come from. Single women tend to be receptive to Democratic candidates, and hostile to Republicans and their culture war politics. As Greg Sargent noted, there is already some evidence that the contraception debate is pushing single women who had defected from the Obama camp back into his fold. The Limbaugh drama could accelerate this trend.
Amanda Marcotte claims the GOP underestimated American acceptance of premarital sex:
Americans are still uptight about poor women having sex, teenage girls having sex, queer women having sex, and women who openly reject the path to marriage and motherhood having sex, but they're just fine with the Sandra Flukes of the world having sex. Cohabitation before marriage is the national norm, and not just for my generation. I'm from Texas, for god's sake, and I can probably count the married couples I know under 60 who didn't live together before marriage on one hand, and in all my life, I've never known anyone to have a fight with their family about that.
The Dish 