Category: The Dish

It makes sense to me: they’re both very New Hampshire-style candidates (I guess I’m a pretty New Hampshire-style blogger, politically, given my fondness for both). Check out the swing in the last two months: Obama has gone from a 14 point deficit to a 2 point lead; McCain has gone from a 15 point deficit to a two point deficit. If momentum counts, McCain and Obama will both win – and the imponderable will be who pulls in the most Independents. That, in turn, surely depends on Iowa. My sense is that if McCain emerges as a front-runner, he could take off.

Scientists figure out how to win at rock, paper scissors.

Some smart advice from Eric De Place:

You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than you can switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car.

So, we should stop trying to design a techno-magic "car for the future." It really won’t end our oil addiction or save us from climate change. That’s right: no more HyperCar and no more FreedomCar. At least not until we’ve done the dull and unsexy work of boosting fuel economy at the bottom of the fleet, where it matters far, far, far more.

The real fix for oil addiction isn’t exciting, and it doesn’t lend itself to massive research investments. We just need to do stuff that we already know how to do. So here’s my new policy proposal. While CAFE standards (fleet averages) are groovy, what we really need to do is simply outlaw vehicles that get below, say, 15 or 18 mpg.

Pretty staggering:

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

It probably made Michelle Malkin’s Christmas. Powerline:

Hoover was too quick to judge people disloyal–it would be interesting to get a look at the list of 12,000– but some may feel nostalgic for a time when disloyalty was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.

A reader writes:

With respect to your post on noses and penises,

In mainstream Japanese animation marketed to adolescents, the nosebleed is comic shorthand for male sexual arousal. Typically, a man (teen to bent and aged) will unexpectedly encounter a nearly nude female beauty, and blood will begin shooting out from his nostrils like gore from a sliced villain in a Quentin Tarentino film.  With the rising popularity of anime and manga in the past ten years, American teens are probably familiar with this trope (lust-provoked nosebleeds happen with some frequency in the Cartoon Network’s hugely popular DragonBall Z and Naruto cartoons, for example).

The things Dish readers know…

A reader writes:

In your post about Megan McCardle’s criticisms of Paul, you quoted the following:

"[Ron Paul] also has a number of beliefs that are, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly insane.  The gold standard is one…"

For the record, I have no idea about McCardle’s views on the Iraq War and no reason to think she is being disingenuous in her criticisms of Paul’s economic policies (unlike, for example, the truly odious David Frum).  But this statement, unfortunately, perpetuates one of the most common myths floating around about Ron Paul in the blogosphere, namely that he supports the immediate restoration of a strict gold standard for U. S. currency.  While Paul would ultimately like to see the dollar pegged to gold again, he does not advocate doing this precipitously. What he does support doing right now is legalizing private currencies backed by gold and silver.

Legalizing private commodity-backed currencies would give individuals the right to guard themselves against the inflationary tendencies of the greenback, without the various legal obstacles imposed by the current system. Paul’s hope is that over time enough people will voluntarily to switch to gold-backed currencies as to make the final transition back to a real gold standard for the dollar relatively  painless.  His views on this subject are succinctly outlined in his essay "The Political and Economic Agenda for a Real Gold Standard" in the 1985 book "The Gold Standard: An Austrian Perspective," edited by Lew Rockwell.  Furthermore, as Peter Boettke explains in recent posts on his blog, these views are not merely the eccentric ramblings of a deluded old man, but similar to the opinions on monetary policy held by a number of distinguished economists, such as the Nobel Laureate Friedrich von Hayek.

In a graph:

More minutiae analysis here.

A reader writes:

More than just a few years ago a buddy and I sat on the porch of our rented house in a famous New England woman’s college town sipping beers on a sunny Saturday watching the beautiful coeds walk on by when he turned to me and said, "You know they always look a lot better when you don’t know em".

I’m staying out of this.

A reader writes:

You can see the blatant sexism and misogyny in so much of the Hillary hating out there, can’t you? Since you never distance yourself from the anti-Hillary extremists, I often find myself unkindly reading your anti-Hillary posts and saying to myself, "Jesus! This guy has issues with women."

I can’t prove a negative. But I can say that I think I’ve treated Clinton as toughly as I did her husband, and no one accused me of being androphobic. There are many, many women I admire in public life, among them Condi Rice, Angela Merkel, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane Harman, and Oprah Winfrey. I became fascinated by politics because of one woman, Margaret Thatcher, whom I eagerly supported in every election she ran in. I have no problem with women in power. It’s this woman I have problems with: she is, I believe, a cynical, calculating, untrustworthy shell. And when I’ve written similar things about Romney, I don’t get accused of being anti-Mormon. I’m sure there’s some sexism and misogyny out there around Clinton. I don’t like it; and I reject the notion that I’ve promoted it.

A reader writes:

It’s just possible, if Obama were the nominee, the Rovian machine that would come after him would meet the same fate the Clinton campaign has experienced during the primaries.  There’s something about Obama that makes sliming him spatter back on the slimer.  After eight years of Bush-Cheney-Rove, the country might be in the mood for something different.  Unless they find something real to hang on Obama (not elementary school or adolescence), the swift-boating could backfire in 2008.

(Photo: Hiro Komosuike/Getty.)