Romney explains his loss:
4. I took a bad fall at a campaign rally and broke my hair.
3. I wanted to finally take off that dark suit and tie, and kick back in a light-colored suit and tie.
2. Once my wife Ann realized I couldn’t win, my fundraising dried up.
1. There was a miscalculation in our theory: "As Utah goes, so goes the nation.”
He missed one: He believed Hugh Hewitt had a grip on reality.
Hilzoy contemplates the meaning of senior officials approving torture:
One of the great dangers of the Bush administration is that it will permanently alter our sense of what is possible or acceptable. You can see an analog of this when people say things like: Bush won’t be able to do X, or: he will have to do Y, where these statements do not refer to physical necessity or impossibility. (E.g., if memory serves, when the surge began, some Republicans said: if it doesn’t work, Bush will have to withdraw.) The sense in which people who say such things think that Bush "has to" or "can’t" do something or other is just that there are certain things we do not believe that any President would do, and others we think he must do. There are lines we assume he would never cross.
But this administration does not recognize the existence of any such lines. They do not "have to" withdraw just because none of their plans have worked, the army is breaking, and the war has next to no popular support. They would "have to" withdraw only if someone put a gun to their collective heads and forced them to. They do not "have to" obey the law or the Constitution: they will only if they are literally compelled to. Likewise, they do not "have to" respect even the most basic principles of decency and humanity, even when obligated to do so by US law and treaties we have signed, which are, according to the Constitution, the law of the land. Neither moral suasion nor legal obligation seem to matter to them. The only sense in which they "have to" do anything is the sense involving physical necessity.
But shouldn’t we be discussing Barack Obama’s ties to domestic terrorism? I mean: where’s the sense of perspective here?
Parsing the Pope on Iraq. When you add the authorization of torture to the moral calculus and the empowerment of some of the most evil elements in Tehran, the picture gets even worse.
Matt Cooper on some of the economic questions from the debate:
If Americans needed more proof that the media elite are rich and out of touch, Gibson gave them more. In the St. Anselm’s College debate in New Hampshire, Gibson asserted that average professors make $100,000. They don’t. The median household income is around $46,000. For families it’s closer to $68,000. Last night in Philadelphia, he blithely repeated the canard that cutting capital gains taxes yields more revenue. The short answer is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. The rooster crows and the sun rises. Just because revenue has risen following some capital gains cuts doesn’t mean it automatically yields a cut. Gibson stated it as fact.[…]
On Social Security, Clinton has wisely not committed to raising the cap on income that falls under the FICA tax. Obama has, either courageously or foolishly, depending on how you look at it, brought up this option repeatedly. I’ve been surprised that this hasn’t been an issue for many months when I wrote a piece called "Is $97,000 Rich?" Obama is essentially calling for a huge tax increase. Last night he seemed to suggest again that he might not tax income between $97,000 and $250,000, which is odd to say the least. As I understand it, President Obama would be smitten with the idea of applying the F.I.C.A. tax on wages from zero to $97,000 and then exempting income from $97,000 to $250,000, and then start taxing it again. That’s both illogical and regressive. There may be a case for raising the cap but there’s no intellectual argument for taxation followed by a pause in taxation followed by more taxation. Clinton’s wisely called for kicking the whole thing to a commission, which is what John McCain has done. Beleaguered, Obama noted that the sainted 1983 Reagan-O’Neill commission on Social Security, headed by Alan Greenspan, raised the retirement age and raised the Social Security tax. Fair enough. But tossing out policy proposals on the fly doesn’t make any sense.
A question for George Stephanopoulos. Hey: there’s some evidence out there. And it gets to the core questions of "character, experience, credibility."
Ann Coulter’s dream may be closer to reality than some might imagine.
Japan works on bridging the mind-computer gap.
The latest in design:
One memorable example of the power of choice architecture comes from the men’s rooms at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. There the authorities have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess, but if they see a target, their attention and accuracy improve. Spillage at the airport decreased by 80%!
As a life-long asthmatic, I’ve always appreciated breathing more than most people learn to. As a child, before serious asthma meds, I learned not to panic or hyperventilate when the attacks came. My dad would spend hours in the night picking me up and calming my lungs down. This bronchial thing – I’ve called it Hillary – has been one of the worst in a long while. Asthma medication is far better than it used to be – those evil pharmaceutical companies are to blame – but a combo of allergies, bacteria and exhaustion can still revive my old dark fears and knock me on my back. I was convinced for a long time that if I died of AIDS, it would be through pneumocysistis. I watched what it did to friends and it wasn’t pretty. But today, I actually was able to get on my bike and cycle for a few blocks and breathe without seizing up. I was able to spend a whole day out of bed for the first time in almost two weeks. And was it a beautiful day. Most of the time, I don’t stop simply to marvel at the miracle of breathing, of the feeling of clear air in your lungs, the origin of the words "inspire" and "spirit." But I did today. And it was a wonderful thing.
Covering politics is hard, so they do this instead:
