Month: May 2012

As Gingrich exits, the Paul campaign continues. His supporters took more than half of the delegate slots in Massachusetts over the weekend:

[T]he losses are an alarming indication that Romney's campaign organization is still woefully underdeveloped, even in the state where he served as governor, and where his campaign headquarters are located. … Massachusetts wasn't the only state where Paul notched delegate victories this weekend.

The campaign announced Sunday that Paul supporters will make up 74 percent of the delegates at the Louisiana GOP convention, putting Paul in prime position to pick up a sizable chunk of the state's national convention delegates. Paul supporters also reportedly made inroads at Alaska's GOP convention, overcoming staunch opposition from the state party Establishment. Even Paul's campaign advisors admit that, despite the success of their convention strategy, it would be virtually impossible to deny Romney the 1,144-delegate majority he needs to win the nomination on the first ballot. But delegates also vote on the convention chair, the vice president, and the party platform, and Romney could have a hard time controlling those votes if the delegate team he brings to the convention is loyal to another coach.

Almost certainly not, given the paucity of current data:

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen [suggest] that the average IQ in Africa is around 70 points, compared with much higher averages in East Asia and the West…most of Lynn and Vanhanen's data is, in fact, made up. Of the 185 countries in their study, actual IQ estimates are available for only 81. The rest are "estimated" from neighboring countries. But even where there is data, it would be a stretch to call it high quality. A test of only 50 children ages 13 to 16 in Colombia and another of only 48 children ages 10 to 14 in Equatorial Guinea, for example, make it into their "nationally representative" dataset…It is, surely, hard to take a multiple-choice test when you don't know how to read. Not surprisingly, IQ test results in Africa are weakly aligned to other measures of intelligence that don't require written test-taking.

The authors note correctly that IQ is a function of a cultural construct, the ability to succeed in middle class Western capitalist society. So I'm not sure why they would deny that such big differences do exist across the world and can be explained by lack of economic and social development. The Flynn effect shows that IQ can move swiftly upward as development proceeds. The question, really, is: why is Africa still such a basket-case? Why do we simply assume that it will not be in any way an economic power, even though its natural resources are plentiful? Why do we not hold the same conceptions about, say, the Chinese or Indians or South Koreans?

There are many possible answers: our own racism, colonialism, tribalism, and culture. But some of that seems to me to deny Africans themselves actual agency – just as the Arab world remains remarkably backward, outside its oil bonanza, and it's not racist to point that out as a reason for reform. But figuring out why some parts of the world have been able to rise from rank poverty to real wealth in a generation, while others stagnate still further, is surely worth serious inquiry. And IQ is one tool in testing that progress.

(Map: area based on GDP by WorldMapper)

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein's reality check has been pinging around the blogs the past few days. Money quote:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

Bernstein reframes the debate:

The Republican Party is severely dysfunctional, not severely conservative. And it's going to take honest, sane, conservatives to restore it to health. How that can happen, alas, I have no idea at all.

Jennifer Rubin fumes:

If Ornstein and Mann were really shameless, they’d ignore the president’s partisan attacks on Republicans (accusing them of putting party above country, wanting us to breath dirty air and drink dirty water) and his failure to propose comprehensive immigration reform, preferring to use it as a wedge issue to inflame ethnic antagonisms. If they cared not a fig for their professional reputations, they’d throw around adjectives ("extreme" is always an easy one) with no factual support and cite intemperate House Republicans rather than the legions of deal-making Republicans in both Houses. They would cite fringe cranks like former senator Chuck Hagel.

Bernstein counters:

[A] listing of things that Democrats have done that annoy Rubin doesn’t get to the problem that Mann and Ornstein are concerned about, which is a dysfunctional political party that the Madisonian political system isn’t well-equipped to handle. Not one that is too conservative, or one that does annoying things, but one that, for example, acts as if having a Republican Member of the House claim that dozens of Democrats are members of the Communist Party is just normal partisan sniping.

Amen. To give two simple examples: the outrageous use of the filibuster in the Senate and the refusal to give an incoming president in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s a single vote on a stimulus package that was one third tax cuts.

Anne Stringfield reports on efforts to defeat the amendment:

The [Coalition to Protect North Carolina Families, an organization formed to fight the amendment] has targeted exactly the voters who those opposing gay rights have counted on most in past campaigns: religious communities. One of the Coalition’s first hires was a director of faith outreach, and so far, more than four hundred bishops, ministers, rabbis, and so forth have signed on as “people of faith against Amendment One.” Many have made videos or issued statements explaining why they’ve made this decision. In addition to the expected fund- and consciousness-raising events around the state (parties, art exhibits, beer tastings), sermons and Bible study groups have become part of the anti-amendment conversation.

The Coalition is also targeting African-Americans, with the help of the NAACP. Weigel looks at the poll numbers:

[A]ccording to PPP only 54 percent of Democrats oppose Amendment One. Only 43 percent of black voters oppose it. The end of the GOP presidential primary has made it easier for liberals to get to 50.1 percent against the amendment, sure. But if you apply the poll preferences to turnout so far, you still watch the Amendment pass. 

Earlier commentary on the amendment here and here.

Larison gets it right:

The gap between the ambitious and aggressive nature of Romney’s proposed foreign policy and the preparation and knowledge needed to conduct such a foreign policy is huge. It should also tell us something that most of the least prepared presidents had the most grandiose and ambitious visions for U.S. foreign policy, and in those cases the U.S. suffered greatly for their misguided and excessive vision and their lack of preparation. 

Hands up who wants a return to Cheneyesque foreign policy? Fanaticism and incompetence don't always go together. But they do here.

"What they should be saying is, ‘We have the right ideas and we’re pursuing them as far as we can given the opposition from Republicans,’ which would be more or less the true narrative. They have decided that it sounds like weakness to say that we haven’t been doing everything that we should be doing. And so they have instead opted to always pretend that what they thought they were able to get is also exactly what they should have done. So they’ve never conceded that that first stimulus was too small, or that there really should have been a second round of stimulus. And that means that if things go badly, they end up owning it. They can’t say, ‘Don’t blame us, blame the do-nothing Congress,'" – Paul Krugman.

The experienced, moderate Indiana Senator looks likely to lose in the primaries to a Tea Party challenger. Kornacki explains the importance:

The real implications of a Lugar loss next week will be psychological: How will watching yet another prominent Republican with a solidly conservative record lose in a primary affect the mindset of average Republican member of Congress? Chances are, it will make him or her even more resistant to taking any action, big or small, that might possibly be construed as ideologically disloyal.

Should Lugar lose, Nate Silver expects a close general election race for the senate seat. Big picture:

Although Democrats still face considerable difficulty in retaining the Senate, their offensive prospects have gradually become more promising over the course of the cycle, with clear pickup opportunities in Massachusetts and Nevada and some prospects in Arizona. Democrats might also hope to have a de facto pickup in Maine, where the independent Angus King is the clear favorite and they have essentially conceded the race to him, although Mr. King has yet to commit to caucusing with either party should he win.

“I dont miss driving around scared to hit mexicans walkin on the side of the street, soft ass wanna be thugs messin with peoples cars when they aint around (what are you provin, that you can dent a car when no ones watchin) dont make you a man in my book. Workin 96 hours to get a decent pay check, gettin knifes pulled on you by every mexican you run into!” – George Zimmerman, on a now discontinued MySpace page.

“The media portrayal of George as a racist could not be further from the truth,” – George Zimmerman's father.

A reader writes:

I bet Grenell didn’t bow out because of a few anti-gay comments from the fringe right.  That seems like a willful and dishonest misdirection.

I’d  wager his paper trail of insane blog posts and vile tweets caught up to him.  The embarrassment for Romney was that Grenell wasn’t vetted. At all.  In a post-Palin world, that is a big sin.  As soon as he was announced, there was a torrent of negative stories about what Grenell had said and written (though, hilariously, he tried to scrub those posts and tweets out of existence).  He became a story because he wasn’t forthcoming with the campaign when hired and they didn’t vet him worth a damn.  Ric Grenell did himself in.  He is no gay martyr.