Is Romney Barring A Muslim From His Cabinet?

Here’s the alleged quote:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

It would be a Hewitt-level feat of double-standards if Romney were to use someone’s religious faith as a criterion for inclusion in his administration, don’t you think? Powerline harrumphs. Geraghty hedges.

eFight! eFight!

The strange world of online video brawling:

Some of the fights are fake, many are real, some fall in between. There’s a lot of hair-pulling incompetence, but there are also moments of genuine inspiration in which regular folks under pressure discover their inner Conan….The various subgenres and minutely discrete iterations flow together into a cut-rate, bottom-feeding, mass-authored poem of force. Ancient Greece had its epic tradition, and classical Chinese literature had the jiang hu, the martial world; we’ve got YouTube.

I watched a handful of them and this one was the worst thumping I saw. Best not to talk smack to passing motorists whom you do not know.

Malkin Award Nominee

"Wal-Mart is doing something good for the family here; they’re refusing to recognize homosexuals as being married, and we encourage people to shop at Wal-Mart as much as possible," – American Family Association Chairman Don Wildmon.

Wal-Mart refuses to give the domestic partners of its gay employees health insurance. Target does. Hat tip: Brayton.

Is this the 2007 Malkin Award winner? Don’t Forget To Vote Here!

Race and IQ Update

Brad DeLong says the question is largely irrelevant to actual social inequality:

If inherited genetically-based IQ were the source of the extra edge that the children of the rich get in our society, than we would expect a parent with 4 times average lifetime full-time earnings–say $200,000 a year–to have a kid with a lifetime average income of $51,500 instead of the average of $50,000. But it is not $51,500. It is $150,000.

I agree with Matt that "where people end up [in our society] is substantially out of their hands" (although not by any means completely): luck and inheritance of many kinds of things are incredibly important. But this does not mean that equality of opportunity is a mirage. For most of the things that are out of the hands of the individual are not out of our collective hands at all. Genetic influence on IQ is one of the big things that are out of our collective hands–and it turns out it is really not that big a thing at all.

Frontal Cortex’s Jonah says the debate is a function of our obsession with quantifying things.