A Times/Populus poll released after the debate showed Mr Cameron defeating Mr Clegg by 37% to 36, with Mr Brown on 27%.
Basically a tie. If Labour slides further into third place, all bets are off. This is by far the least predictable election since 1992. It feels to me like a tectonic plate shifting. That the Liberal Democrats are vying for first place – and have the most appealing potential prime minister and craggiest old chancellor – is gob-smacking. Imagine if Perot had sustained a lead over both Republicans and Democrats. If there's a surge in the youth vote, politics in Britain may change for ever.
My concern about the experiment involving pistol shooters and fencers is that the activity they were performing was one in which they had already developed appropriate muscle memory for the task. They were practiced in those activities and so were able to do them with relative ease, and thus calm. A better experiment would have been to have athletes and non-athletes do physical tasks that none of them were familiar with. Ask the pistol shooters to stand on one foot, or the fencers to shoot at targets. I have watched any number of newcomers to the Pilates method, many of them hard-core athletes with considerable skill in their respective sports, struggle mightily with learning the movements. Athletes, in fact, often experience more frustration than non-athletes at first because they expect it to be easy. No quiet minds there.
Ezra Klein interviews Dodd about the financial regulation bill:
What we've done here says that if you're going to become a certain size, that's fine. But you're going to have to meet different capital standards, you're going to have different criteria that are going to protect us against the possibility you can fail. And just in case you have any doubts about this, if you do fail, all your management's fired, all your shareholders lose, all your creditors lose, you can't go back into the business for years to come. So yeah, you can get bigger, but there are going to be a lot of things to insulate us and our economy from the kind of hazards you could pose by your size.
Simon Johnson –surprise!– would rather break up the big banks.
CNAS has released a long report edited by Andrew Exum on how international forces might help solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lynch is one of the authors:
My concluding chapter sketches out four scenarios under which such an International Force might be deployed — with or without the Palestinian Authority in its current form, and with or without a negotiated agreement.
The best case scenario of a full negotiated peace is complex enough, with many opportunities for spoiler attacks and with the job of enforcing compliance with the agreement creating endless opportunities for conflict and clashes. A partial agreement scenario, where Israel reaches a peace agreement only with the current PA in the West Bank, is one of the more likely scenarios and one of the most dangerous for an international force since there would be great pressure for it to morph into a counter-insurgency force battling Hamas and other opposition movements. The other two scenarios would follow from an Israeli decision to unilaterally disengage from the West Bank as Sharon did from Gaza, a move which the current PA might or might not survive. While no government may want to become involved in such a situation, they may do so as the only alternative to the PA's collapse.
There is much more there, and this overview can not do it justice. I hope that you'll read the whole thing and that it might help trigger productive debate on exactly how a two-state solution might be achieved should we ever get to that point.
1) This has not been a game-changer, in the way that last week's debate was. 2) Clegg has not crashed. In fact, he's been pretty good. (According to the Guardian tracker, he's winning.) His opening statement was very good, and he concluded with a powerful statement about the way politics can change. If anyone thought the Lib Dem bandwagon was going to be stopped tonight, they were wrong.
3) Cameron wanted a win. I don't think he's had one. Labour will come out saying the fact that he did not dominate meant that he was the loser tonight. I don't think that's fair – he held his own very well – but he did not dominate the debate like a prime minister-in-waiting.
Here's the instanst spin: Labour people say: it isn't about presentation; Cameron failed to land a knock-out blow. Not very convincing. Lib Dems pretty jolly, feel their man came through foreign-affairs unscathed. Tories feel Dave's anger worked for him and that he raised his game on last week. Last two both vindicated by two early polls: Clegg wins in [one]; Cameron the other; poor Gordon trails in both.
You have to admire Clegg. Immigration is a very weak hand for him but he’s gone on the offensive and is actually dominating this question. I’d love to see the worm on this one. If it were a debating contest you’d give it to him but he is still telling people what they don’t want to hear.
Sky announces an instant YouGov poll which has Cameron the winner on 36 per cent, Clegg second on 32 per cent, Gordon Brown 29 per cent.
Today's YouGov/Sun poll also showed the Tories back on top, but not by much. Anthony Wells looks at ComRes's numbers which found "33% thinking Clegg won, and Cameron and Brown in equal second place on 30%":
We have different polls calling different winners, but what is very clear is that Nick Clegg has not been the same sort of runaway winner with the public that he was in the first debate. This was a much closer run thing.
I'll write something more detailed later, but my verdict on the debate would be that Cameron and Brown really raised their games, with Clegg still performing strongly, but not as strongly as last week. I think the YouGov/Sun instant poll got it about right but I'd put Brown slightly ahead of Clegg and Cameron just inching it.
David Cameron was far better. In fact had he performed like this in the first debate he would probably not be in as much of a mess as he is now in the polls. He had more passion, more fight, more coherence in his arguments and yet avoided looking too aggressive. He did well on Afghanistan in particular, which makes him seem more prime ministerial. On the downside he did not reclaim the change mantle form Clegg and this may be a problem for him. Until his summing up I’d have scored him slightly ahead of Nick Clegg, but it was all a little Vera Lynn, more sunny uplands; we can all pull through together, Bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover. Even so he will have settled some Tory nerves – including his own.
Nick Clegg was hit from both sides and seemed frankly unable to cope. He ended up looking shallow and glib, and to the great viewing public who may have had no idea that it was LibDem policy to introduce an amnesty for illegal immigrants, or to give up our independent nuclear deterrent, or to embrace Brussels with open arms, this debate may well prove – as the saying goes – a game changer.
The most striking thing to me as an American was how much of this national security debate had nothing to do with national security. That Grace seemed like a very sweet lady, but you don't talk about old people's pensions in a national security debate.
It just goes to prove that being the world's policeman is our responsibility alone.
Don't underestimate how disciplined and how ambitious Clegg is, my veteran Lib Dem strategist pointed out this week. He is ready for the fact that the other parties will play the man not the ball, just as they did in this morning's disgraceful rightwing papers. Tonight's debate was proof that both Labour and the Conservatives remain very afraid. This one is going to go right down to the wire.
Caplan makes the same (offensive) mistake that many human-cloning opponents make: not fully recognizing that a cloned child would be its own person, as human as you or me, as like and as different. I never agreed with the cloning prohibitionists and I don’t now. But I always counted on them having the creepier end of the argument.
A reader adds:
Perhaps this should go without saying, but an individual's clone will *not* be exactly like that individual, even if the clone is a perfect genetic copy. We already have such people – perfect genetic copies of each other – all over the place. They're called identical twins.
As any of us who have gotten to know identical twins can tell you, though they look and sound incredibly similar, they're different people. Different tastes, different ambitions, different views. There is a lot of evidence that identical twins, even ones separated at birth, share a lot of character traits or propensities. But even then, even at a biological level, they're different people.
The expression of a trait, phenotype, is a different beast than the coding of that trait in genes, or genotype. The trait in question, whatever it is, must be translated from the genetic code and expressed. Differences in environment, even for identical twins raised in the same home by the same parents, do exist on a "micro" level and will be reflected, however slightly, in the phenotypic expression of the otherwise exactly similar genetic codes shared by these twins.
This is why, when Caplan says, "I'm confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me", he reveals that he doesn't understand what he's talking about. Caplan wouldn't be raising a doppelganger, but a much younger identical twin with its own agency and with a slightly different phenotypic expression of the same genes. His "mini-me", if you will, might not have any his tastes or views at all, and might very well dislike being raised by "himself".
The area of study the reader is referring to is called epigenetics. The NOVA episode previewed above can be seen in three parts – here, here, and here.
"In the 14 years we’ve been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn’t stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle’s customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn’t mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too. We’ll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we’ll see what happens to it," – Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
The Dish 