Why Romney Failed

David Frum says it was because he became the candidate to continue Bush’s legacy. And even Republicans don’t want that. I think that’s part of it. But his obvious inauthenticity was more important; and the bigotry of Southern evangelicals. Frum tolerates this sectarian bigotry when it’s directed at gay people – that’s how you win places like Ohio in 2004 – but when it hurts a phony Republican multi-millionaire, it’s distressing.

Here Comes The Sun

Climate change CO2 skeptics have long argued that the sun’s cycles are the most potent influence on the earth’s climate. More research is surely a good idea:

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Could the sun give us time to solve global warming?

And This Is The Modern Bit Of The Middle East

News from Dubai:

A father-of-three who was found with a microscopic speck of cannabis stuck to the bottom of one of his shoes has been sentenced to four years in a Dubai prison. Keith Brown, a council youth development officer, was travelling through the United Arab Emirates on his way back to England when he was stopped as he walked through Dubai’s main airport.

A search by customs officials uncovered a speck of cannabis weighing just 0.003g – so small it would be invisible to the naked eye and weighing less than a grain of sugar – on the tread of one of his shoes.

Barack X

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In asking ourselves why Obama is doing so well among the young, I found this 1999 Ted Halstead Atlantic article prescient:

Three quarters of Generation X agree with the statement "Our generation has an important voice, but no one seems to hear it." Whatever this voice may be, it does not fit comfortably within existing partisan camps. "The old left-right paradigm is not working anymore," according to the novelist Douglas Coupland, who coined the term "Generation X." Neil Howe and William Strauss, who have written extensively on generational issues, have argued in these pages that from the Generation X perspective "America’s greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again."

If Xers have any ideology, it is surely pragmatism. In an attempt to be more specific Coupland has claimed, "Coming down the pipe are an extraordinarily large number of fiscal conservatives who are socially left." The underlying assumption here is that the Xer political world view stems simplistically from a combination of the 1960s social revolution and the 1980s economic revolution. This kind of thinking has led some to describe young adults as a generation of libertarians, who basically want government out of their bedrooms and out of their pocketbooks. As it turns out, however, the political views of most Xers are more complex and more interesting than that.

Is Obama fiscally conservative? Not in the way I’d prefer. He’ll spend too much. But for those of us conservatives who still believe – sorry, NRO – that the government should balance its books and not promise any more than it can realistically provide, Obama is far more fiscally conservative than Bush Republicans. He is at least cognizant that money doesn’t grow on trees. McCain helps narrow the choice – he’s one of the few fiscal conservatives who walks the walk. But McCain is just generationally off for the Obama generation, I suspect. I love the guy, but I’m the old guard now.

(Photo: an Obama rally last year in Washington Square Park, New York City. By Emmanuel Dunand/Getty.)