Month: May 2012

Today on the Dish, Andrew defended Obama's decision to campaign on the bin Laden raid (response to a reader on McCain specifically here), decried the pressure campaign that led to the firing of Romney's gay spokesman, and wasn't buying Beinart's theory that this campaign was going to be boring. We caught another Big Lie from Romney, watched independents return to Obama as the race narrowed, heard from readers on Obama's "forward" slogan, checked on the latest entry in the veepstakes, and compared two ads on North Carolina's anti-gay amendment. Libertarians had an opportunity to run on pot legalization, Ron Paul debated Paul Krugman, and The American Prospect needed your donations. Ad War Update here.

Andrew also reflected on Mays of yore, gaped at the labelling of David Remnick as "anti-Israel," and went after Jose Rodriguez's theory of the relationship between the President and the CIA. Afghans may have been inflicted en masse with PTSD, infrastructure couldn't fix Europe, and employment appeared here to stay. We matched the brogrammer with his inner frat boy, guessed we were entering the age of the e-book, tracked the flow of urban trash, and noticed an uptick in carnivorous city dwellers. Susan Sontag backed off the personal fight against homophobia, apologies were linguistically tricky, violence created its own social language, and everyone needed pre-K. Self-help hurt, having a celebrity's name kinda sucked, and a falling sky would kill us all. Ask Steven Pinker Anything here, Quotes for the Day here, here, and here, Malkin nominee here, Hathos Alert here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

– Z.B.

Robert Grant immersed himself in self-help books and blogs. He wasn't impressed:

[I]t becomes your job, a burden: always be positive. You maintain positivity in the hopes that success will follow. That is, underlying this mind-set is a real feeling of hope; hope that it will "work", that this positivity will pay off. And as this hope builds and the results don’t appear, it can become extremely difficult to know how to deal with failure… [T]his anti-negative stance also doubles as a useful tool for disregarding critics and making it difficult to reject the teachings once you’ve made a commitment to them. In order to move past the superficial philosophy of Personal Development, you first need to examine and criticize it, but to do so would be to break the cardinal rule: be positive.

Dana Goldstein makes it: 

Any radical rethinking of American public policy ought to start with a consideration of one of our most politically neglected populations: The majority of 3-to-5-year-olds who have no access to high-quality, low-cost educational options. As scientists have learned more about the brain, they've concluded the early years are the most crucial ones for cognitive development. Seventy-five percent of middle-class kindergarteners can write their own names, compared to just about half of poor kindergartners. The typical middle-class 5-year old can identify all 26 letters of the alphabet on her first day of school; a 5-year old living in poverty may know only two letters. By first grade, middle-class children have double the vocabulary of their low-income peers.

All these early literacy skills are associated with success in elementary school and beyond: Third-graders who aren't proficient in reading are four times less likely than proficient readers to graduate from high school.

Romney's Super PAC, Restore Our Future, reemerges for the general election with $3.7 million in ads across nine key states: 

The Obama campaign unfurls the "Swiss Bank Account" attack, pivoting off another response to big oil: 

Alex Burns has more: 

The Obama campaign has bought $458,883 in airtime so far in Ohio, $88,455 in Iowa and $72,845 in Virginia for ads running May 1 to May 7, a buyer source says. … [The ad] follows a formula Maggie and I wrote about last month, both pushing back on anti-Obama claims made by outside GOP groups and taking a whack at Romney directly in the process.

Previous Ad War Updates: Apr 30, Apr 27, Apr 26, Apr 25, Apr 24, Apr 23, Apr 18, Apr 17, Apr 16, Apr 13, Apr 11, Apr 10, Apr 9, Apr 5, Apr 4, Apr 3, Apr 2, Mar 30, Mar 27, Mar 26, Mar 23, Mar 22, Mar 21, Mar 20, Mar 19, Mar 16, Mar 15, Mar 14, Mar 13, Mar 12, Mar 9, Mar 8, Mar 7, Mar 6, Mar 5, Mar 2, Mar 1, Feb 29, Feb 28, Feb 27, Feb 23, Feb 22, Feb 21, Feb 17, Feb 16, Feb 15, Feb 14, Feb 13, Feb 9, Feb 8, Feb 7, Feb 6, Feb 3, Feb 2, Feb 1, Jan 30, Jan 29, Jan 27, Jan 26, Jan 25, Jan 24, Jan 22, Jan 20, Jan 19, Jan 18, Jan 17, Jan 16 and Jan 12.

Barro makes the case for Chris Christie:

Putting Christie on the ticket would … give Romney the best of both worlds: increased credibility with conservatives without actually having to take policy stances that alienate moderates. A recent poll shows how that formula is working: Christie’s approval in New Jersey stands at 92 percent among Republicans, but he’s also picking up 64 percent of independents and even 30 percent of Democrats.

Other contenders the Dish has noted: Portman, Ryan, Rubio and McDonnell.

 

The two debated on Bloomberg TV yesterday. Cowen scores the exchange:

There were too many times when RP simply piled polemic points on top of each other and stopped making a sequential argument.  He overrates the costs of inflation, including in the long term, and for a believer in the market finds it remarkably non-robust in response to bad monetary policy.  Still, given that Krugman is a Nobel Laureate in economics, and Paul a gynecologist, the score could have been more lopsided than in fact it was.

Krugman throws up his hands:

[Y]ou approach what is, in the end, a somewhat technical subject in a format in which no data can be presented, in which there’s no opportunity to check facts (everything Paul said about growth after World War II was wrong, but who will ever call him on it?). So people react based on their prejudices. If Ron Paul got on TV and said “Gah gah goo goo debasement! theft!” — which is a rough summary of what he actually did say — his supporters would say that he won the debate hands down; I don’t think my supporters are quite the same, but opions may differ.

Drum uses the exchange to bash debates as a whole.

What constant war may have done to Afghans:

Col. Erik Goepner, currently serving as a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that the Afghan counterinsurgency was all-but-doomed before U.S. troops ever landed there. The reason, he writes, is “the high rate of mental disorders” in Afghanistan and other fragile states. Pervasive depression and post-traumatic stress disorder leads to a sense of "learned helplessness" among the people. And that makes it next-to-impossible to build up the country’s economy and government.

Alotau, Papua New Guinea, 12 pm

Good luck from an enemy to the American Prospect in finding support to keep publishing. Political and ideological magazines are vital.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 30, 2012

The American Prospect, a liberal magazine that has cultivated the careers of some of the blogosphere's brightest lights, may shutter in June without a serious cash infusion:

Prospect editors "thought it was important to be fair to the staff, to let them know there was a possibility that if we didn't fill it, the Prospect's last issue as currently constituted would be the July/August issue." The Prospect, which has a robust website, publishes 10 print issues annually; the July/August double issue closes in late May. In addition to filling the funding gap, the magazine is looking to raise another $500,000 in pledged support for 2012 by the end of June, according to Rachlis.

Weigel has background on the magazine's finances. You can donate here.