5.17 Chris Cilizza in The Washington Post: “President Obama carries a significant, but far from determinative, edge over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the race for 270 electoral votes this fall. . . .Obama starts the general election with 15 states (plus the District of Columbia) and 196 electoral votes solidly for him while Romney begins with 21 states and 170 electoral votes solidly in his corner. (One of the states solidly for Romney is Indiana, where Obama won in 2008 but no one expects a repeat performance in 2012.) Another three states — Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Michigan (16) and New Mexico (5) — lean toward Obama while Arizona (11) and Missouri (10) lean toward Romney. Add up the states solidly for Obama and those leaning his way and you get 237 electoral votes. Add up the states solidly for Romney and those leaning his way and you get 191 electoral votes. While Obama is closer to the prize than Romney, victory will likely come for either man from the nine swing states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia — that are considered genuine toss-ups in our first electoral college predictions.”
5.17 The Washington Post reports “For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority. Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010.”
5.17 The Washington Post reported that a paralyzed Massachusetts woman picked up a bottle of coffee and sipped from it by moving a robotic arm with her thoughts. “The moment marked the first time in 15 years the 58-year-old, who had suffered a stroke, was able to pick up anything of her own volition. Using the Braingate neural interface system, the woman was able to use her thoughts to control a robotic arm. . . Researchers called the advance the first demonstration of reaching and grasping by a brain-
controlled prosthetic arm. In recent years, other paralyzed patients have high-fived with a different robotic arm and moved a cursor around a computer screen simply by thinking about it. While the scientists involved cautioned that it will be years before such devices will be widely available, they hailed the advance as a milestone.
“Things in this field are exploding right now,” said Andrew Schwartz”, who is developing another thought-controlled robotic arm at the University of Pittsburgh.
5.16 James Kwak on the Baseline Scenario: “Liberals need to have a coherent message on the national debt. I think the message should be something like this: the national debt is a real problem that needs to be addressed; we need to address it in the way that’s best for the American people as a whole; that means preserving the social insurance programs that almost everyone depends on; and we can preserve those programs, while bringing the debt under control, through a set of policy changes that make sense on their own grounds (eliminating distorting subsidies, eliminating tax expenditures, introducing Pigovian taxes like a carbon tax and a financial activities tax).”
5.15 Joe Nocera in the Times: “Which brings us, inevitably, to the Volcker Rule, that part of the financial reform law intended to prevent banks from doing what JPMorgan was doing: making risky bets for its own account. JPMorgan executives have insisted in recent days that the London trades did not violate the Volcker Rule (which, for the record, has not yet taken effect). But that is only because the banks have lobbied to protect their ability to hedge entire portfolios. A letter to regulators written in February by a top JPMorgan lobbyist — a letter denouncing the potential effects of a strictly interpreted Volcker Rule — describes a trade that sounds exactly like the ones that have just caused all the problems. Such trades need to be preserved, the lobbyist argues. Actually, they don’t. “I just want all this garbage out of insured banks,” said Sheila Bair, the former head of the FDIC. “A bank with insured deposits should be making loans. If they have excess they should put the money in safe government securities. If they want to trade, set up separate subsidiaries that have higher capital requirements.” What banking most needs is to become boring, the way the business was before bankers became addicted to trading profits.”
5.15 David Brooks in the Times: “There’s an interesting debate over how much personal qualities matter in a presidential election. The evidence this year suggests: a lot. . . .In survey after survey, Obama is far more popular than his policies. The key is his post-boomer leadership style. Critics are always saying that Obama is too cool and detached, arrogant and aloof. But the secret to his popularity through hard times is that he is not melodramatic, sensitive, vulnerable and changeable. Instead, he is self-disciplined, traditional and a bit formal. He is willing, with drones and other mechanisms, to use lethal force. . . .Obama has displayed a kind of ESPN masculinity: postfeminist in his values, but also thoroughly traditional in style — hypercompetitive, restrained, not given to self-doubt, rarely self-indulgent. Administrations are undone by scandal and moments when they look pathetic, but this administration, guarded in all things, has rarely had those moments. In 2008, Obama had that transcendent, messianic tone. This year, he has adopted a Clinton 1996 type of campaign — strong partisan attacks combined with an emphasis on small and medium-sized policies — like the Buffett Rule and student loans — intended to display his common man values. As a result, Obama has come off aggressive, but also, (unlike Romney) classless and in touch with middle-income groups. I’d say that Obama is a slight underdog this year: the scuffling economy will grind away at voters. But his leadership style is keeping him afloat. He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.”
5.14 Eliot Spitzer in Slate: “It was Chase’s own lobbying on Capitol Hill and with the Treasury, the Fed, and other agencies that made these bets arguably permissible within the scope of hedging under the Volcker rule. Had they not lobbied and pushed and delayed and made the rule more complicated, these bets would have been illegal or at a minimum so transparent as to have been smaller and less damaging. The banks love to complain about the complexity of these rules. But the rule as proposed by Paul Volcker was simple. It is only because of the very lobbying by the banks that the complexity and loopholes crept in. The structural solution is not complicated, and it is something close to what was proposed by a conservative banker from the Midwest last week. Warren Stephens, CEO of the Stephens Bank, argues that we should slim down “too big to fail” institutions by a significant factor, reducing their deposits and assets as a percentage of GDP to a more manageable 5 percent from the existing 10 percent—and bring back Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial from investment banking. That way taxpayers would guarantee only what should be guaranteed: deposits and basic lending.”
5.14 Comedian Kristen Schaal on The Daily Show: “What’s the difference between a fertilized egg, a corporation and a woman? One of them isn’t considered a person in Oklahoma.”
5.13 Molly takes a cooking class; Cara comes home
5.13 William Deresiewicz in the Times: “A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law. The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior.This should hardly be news. . . .Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal — just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.”
5.13 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times, quoting Michael Sandel: ““Over the last three decades,” he states, “we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. A market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool — for organizing productive activity. But a ‘market society’ is a place where everything is up for sale. It is a way of life where market values govern every sphere of life.” Why worry about this trend? Because, Sandel argues, market values are crowding out civic practices. When public schools are plastered with commercial advertising, they teach students to be consumers rather than citizens.”

5.13 Maureen Dowd in the Times: “In the end, Obama had to rip off the Band-Aid and take a stand, because if his campaign depends on painting Romney as a bundle of ambiguous beliefs, the first black president can’t be ambiguous himself on a civil rights issue. Not to mention that big bucks from gay backers will be needed to replace the lost bucks from alienated Wall Street donors. The gay community, forgiving all prevarication, was electrified. As the Will & Grace co-creator Max Mutchnick put it on the CBS morning show, there are now little boys who can dream of both being a president and marrying a president. As Obama is reminded of what it feels like to generate excitement, what it feels like to lift the spirits of a demoralized country by using the bully pulpit, maybe he can start occasionally blurting out something he feels strongly about. It’s humanizing.”
5.9 President Obama announces his support for gay marriage
5.8 Sen. Richard Lugar loses Republican primary in Indiana. “If Mr. Mourdock is elected, I want him to be a good Senator,” Lugar’s concession statement said. “But that will require him to revise his stated goal of bringing more partisanship to Washington. He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party.”
5.8 Maurice Sendak dies at 83.
5.4 Dan Balz and Philip Rucker in The Washington Post: “Mitt Romney faces a narrow path to the presidency, one that requires winning back. . . three historically Republican states that Obama won in 2008 — Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia — and believes that changing demographics in Virginia present a challenge. After that, Romney must play take-away with the Democrats in a number of other states that the Obama campaign flipped to its column four years ago. The two biggest and most important are Ohio and Florida, which advisers see as must-wins for Romney unless he can pick off one of the 18 states that Democrats have won in each of the past five elections. Romney’s advisers see two things in particular working to their advantage despite some of the geographic hurdles they face. One is the overall weakness of the economy, which they believe will ultimately decide the election, and the other is that enthusiasm within the Obama coalition is down from 2008. . . .
Romney campaign officials point to Michigan as one of those traditionally Democratic states where they expect to compete hard, noting that it is the former Massachusetts governor’s home state. But some top Romney supporters scoff at those ambitions, arguing that Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout alone is a sizable hurdle to overcome there. . . .If, however, Romney can win the three longtime Republican states and take back Ohio and Florida, he will need just one more of the states that Obama flipped in 2008 to get to 270. Romney advisers express optimism about their chances in two other states in Obama’s column in 2008, Iowa and New Hampshire. . . .Among the tossups is a trio of Western states that Obama carried four years ago: Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. At this early stage, Nevada appears the most competitive because the state’s economy has been decimated by the housing crisis. And Romney’s team is counting on high turnout by Mormon voters there.
5.35.3 The Great Rivera tears his ACL shagging flies, ending his season, and possibly his singular career
5.2 Junior Seau commits suicide at 41.

5.1 For no good reason, a 1993 photo of Kim Cattrall appears in The Huffington Post
5.1 Frank Bruni in the Times: “Gingrich and Edwards belong to different parties but are beholden to similar demons, and they have a whole lot more in common than a bounty of hair — white in the Republican’s case, brunet in the Democrat’s. They’re the salt and pepper of outsize egos in presidential politics. . . .Beware the extreme narcissist. Although he may radiate a seductive confidence, he can justify and forgive himself for just about anything, given his belief in his own exalted purpose. He’ll lose sense of the line between boldness and recklessness. And he’ll quit the stage reluctantly, because he can’t bear not to occupy the very center of it. What once drew so many people to Edwards and to Gingrich? Both men had an exaggerated and infectious certainty about them. In Gingrich’s withering sneer and Edwards’s shampoo-commercial smile, there was a seeming estrangement from any and all doubt. It is the kind of thing that assuages a voter’s anxieties. . . .When you’re that wholly in thrall to your own heady promise, you exempt yourself from rules, absolve yourself of hypocrisy and persuade yourself that you’ll get away with it all. And so Gingrich pressed for the impeachment of a philandering president despite his own continuing adultery, made his partner in adultery his third wife, and then preached traditional values with her on his arm. It was almost inevitable that he cheated: someone as intent on affirmation as Gingrich — or as Edwards — isn’t likely to remain content with the knowing gaze of a longtime spouse. He needs the bedazzled expression of a fresh acolyte. Edwards commenced his lunatic dalliance with Rielle Hunter at his moment of greatest political possibility . . .Neither the affair’s exposure nor the birth of the couple’s child convinced him that his political career was done. He got a slavishly loyal aide to claim to be the baby’s father. As hard as it is to imagine such sycophancy, it’s harder still to imagine the hubris and entitlement of the leader who would request and be comfortable with it. . . .Until last Thursday night, Gingrich had a Secret Service detail that was costing taxpayers about $40,000 a day. Never mind that any hope he had of winning the Republican nomination had been extinguished weeks earlier. The campaign went on. . . .“It’s been a long and expensive two years,” he said. “But it’s been fun.” And that’s what really matters. Gingrich’s good time. . . .As long as he’s an object of mild curiosity, even if it comes with major ridicule, he has not yet become an afterthought. And that’s the territory that men like Gingrich and Edwards dread most.”
4.30 President Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner
4.30 Stephen King in The Daily Beast: “Tough shit for you guys, because I’m not tired of talking about it. I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar. It’s true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. My wife and I give away roughly $4 million a year to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organizations that underwrite the arts. Warren Buffett does the same; so does Bill Gates; so does Steven Spielberg; so do the Koch brothers; so did the late Steve Jobs. All fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.”
4.29 From tonight’s Mad Men: “One day your little girl will spread her legs and fly away.”
4.26 Weider History Group in Leesburg VA–with no brakes!
4.26 In his blog The Audacity of Despair, The Wire‘s David Simon talks about writing for free: “Anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere. . . . A free internet is wonderful for democratized, unresearched commentary, and it works well as a library of sorts for content that no longer needs a defense of its copyright. But journalism, literature, film, music — these endeavors need people operating at the highest professional level and they need to make a living doing what they do. Copyright matters. Content costs.”
4.25 Visited Rose
4.21 Down 9-0 in the sixth inning, the Yankees defeat Boston 15-9. This matched the largest comeback in the team’s history, the fifth such occasion when they have surmounted such a deficit. Nick Swisher (left) and Mark Teixeira each has six RBIs.
4.19 Curtis Granderson goes 5 for 5 with 3 home runs as Yanks beat Twins 7-6.
4.19 Levon Helm dies at 71.
4.19 Barney Frank, quoted in New York magazine: ““People ask me, ‘Why don’t you guys get together?’ And I say, ‘Exactly how much would you expect me to cooperate with Michele Bachmann?’ And they say, ‘Are you saying they’re all Michele Bachmann?’ And my answer is, ‘No, they’re not all Michele Bachmann. Half of them are Michele Bachmann. The other half are afraid of losing a primary to Michele Bachmann.’”
4.18 Dick Clark dies at 82.
4.17 Sad news about Levon Helm.
4.16 James Kwak in the Baseline Scenario: “Republican tax cut plans fall into two categories: the ones that don’t bother pretending that they’re going to be revenue neutral and the ones that do. But the latter can never make the numbers add up because you can’t have massive rate cuts and be revenue neutral unless you’re willing to eliminate popular tax expenditures for the middle class, the preference for investment income (the most important tax break for the rich people who pay for Republican politicians’ campaigns), or both.”
4.16 Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel: ““We are in the grip of a way of looking at the world and social life and even personal relations that is dominated by economic ways of thinking. That’s an impoverished way of looking at the world.”
4.16 Chris Cillizza in The Washington Post: “To our mind, there are nine truly swing states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin — where the election will be decided. Those states will hand out 110 electoral votes in November, roughly 41 percent of the 270 votes President Obama or former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney need to win. Obama starts with the edge in these swing states. He carried all nine in 2008 with an average margin of victory of 7.6 percentage points. But, six of the nine states went for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004.”
4.16 Roseanne Barr in The Daily Beast: “Hilary Rosen should not have attacked the Leisure Class’s women—does Romney pay her, too? What a great opportunity she has given the vast right-wing conspiracy—suggesting that their women don’t work, when everybody can see that the Women of the Right are large and in charge. The picture of Ann Romney “manning” the phone banks in front of a campaign poster that reads “Mitt Romney is good for business” tells me all I need to know about her contributions to her family, her church, and her country—convincing other privileged white women that defeating feminism is necessary to save the confederacy of dunces called the GOP, which steals bread from the mouths of widows and orphans and workers’ retirement funds as it congratulates itself for dismantling all that social-safety-net, entitlement, nanny-state load of socialist insurrection and places that money instead into private hands, so that the filthy working sluts can’t get any of it for their selfish selves. They will just use it to pay for abortions and other fun things if given half a chance.”
4.14 Loose Lips?
4.14 James Kwak on the Baseline Scenario: “There’s no definitional reason why tax reform has to reduce marginal rates. You could simplify the tax code and eliminate loopholes, reducing both administrative and compliance costs and economic distortions, without touching marginal rates. Sure, this would increase revenues. But it seems pretty obvious to me, as it would to a third grader, that if the problem is the budget deficit, then you want to increase revenues. It’s also obvious to Daniel Shaviro, a leading tax professor who has been writing about deficits and tax reform for well over a decade. From the abstract: “First, if tax expenditures are properly viewed as spending through the tax code, a revenue neutrality norm in which the budgetary gain from their repeal ostensibly needs to be offset by rate cuts is intellectually incoherent. Second, the long-term U.S. fiscal gap makes rate-cutting, in particular for individuals, potentially imprudent. Third, if one wants to address rising high-end income concentration in the United States since 1986, the option of raising, rather than reducing, the top marginal income tax rates may need to be squarely considered.” You may disagree with the third point, but the first two seem pretty irrefutable to me.”
4.13 Simon Johnson in the Baseline Scenario: “The world’s largest banks have been accused of many things in recent years, including taking excessive risk in the run-up to 2008, doing great damage to the American economy by blowing themselves up and then working hard to resist any sensible notions of financial reform. All of this is true, but it misses what is likely to be the most profound negative impact of the banks’ behavior on most Americans. The banks’ actions led directly to an increase in government debt, which in turn has made the reduction of that debt by “cutting runaway spending” a centerpiece of the Republican presidential campaign to date. As a result of this pressure, Medicare now stands on the brink of being eliminated as a viable form of social insurance. Yet the executives who lead these banks – and the politicians with whom they work closely – will not be held accountable this election season.”
4.11 Rep. Allen West (R-FL): “I believe there is about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party [in the House of Representatives) that are members of the Communist Party.”
4.10 Robert Reich: ``I have never been as concerned as I am now about the future of our democracy, the corrupting effects of big money in our politics, the stridency and demagoguery of the regressive right, and the accumulation of wealth and power at the very top. We are perilously close to losing an economy and a democracy that work for everyone, and replacing them with an economy and government that exist mainly for a few wealthy and powerful people.''
4.10 Cara goes canoeing with friends.
4.8 Paul Krugman in the Times: ``$4.6 trillion is the revenue cost over the next decade of the tax cuts embodied in Paul Ryan's plan, as estimated by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These cuts — which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent — would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, with the average member of the top 1 percent receiving a tax break of $238,000 a year. Ryan insists that despite these tax cuts his proposal is “revenue neutral,” that he would make up for the lost revenue by closing loopholes. But he has refused to specify a single loophole he would close. And if we assess the proposal without his secret (and probably nonexistent) plan to raise revenue, it turns out to involve running bigger deficits than we would run under the Obama administration’s proposals. Meanwhile, 14 million is a minimum estimate of the number of Americans who would lose health insurance under Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicaid; estimates by the Urban Institute actually put the number at between 14 million and 27 million. So the proposal is exactly as President Obama described it: a proposal to deny health care (and many other essentials) to millions of Americans, while lavishing tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy — all while failing to reduce the budget deficit, unless you believe in Mr. Ryan’s secret revenue sauce.''
4.6 Mike Wallace, the peerless interviewer of 60 Minutes, dies at 93. In this photo: George Crile, my good friend Jim Noonan, and Wallace during the CBS-Westmoreland trial.
4.6 Yanks lose opener to Rays. The Great Rivera blows the save, loses!
4.5 Paul Krugman in the Times: ``The real reason the attacks on Mr. Bernanke from the right are so destructive is that they’re an effort to bully the Fed into doing exactly the wrong thing. The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing.''
4.3 Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast: ``This whole subject of the post-Bush GOP and its relationship to No. 43 is pretty fascinating. Like a crazy, drunk uncle shooting an epileptic dog because he has fleas, the current GOP shuns him for all the wrong reasons. Since the GOP will presumably spend the next few months trying to pretend the man never existed, Democrats ought to remind people that he did. In fact, the Democratic Party should spend the next 20 years talking about Bush, turning him into the new Jimmy Carter and making the memory of those eight squalid years quadrennially fresh to everyone with living memory of them for as long as is humanly possible.''
4.2 Kentucky beats Kansas, 67-59, to win the NCAA Mens Basketball Championship.
4.1 Michael Sandel in The Atlantic: ``Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale? For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption. First, consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence—or the lack of it—matters. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to afford yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would matter less than they do today. But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger. The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.'' More than that, I would say. It's also because we suspect--nay, we know--that markets are rigged. And second, because the market then comes to justify anything and everything.
3.31 Kentucky beats Louisville 69-61, advances to the Finals. Anthony Davis is amazing!
3.31 James Kwak in The Baseline Scenario: ``Liberty should have nothing to do with this case {health care]. . . .There’s nothing in the Constitution that guarantees you “liberty” in the abstract. The Bill of Rights guarantees you various freedoms, from the freedom of speech to the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, but those are all specific, not general. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments don’t hold up against an enumerated power of Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment provides broad protection for liberty interests, but only protects them from being infringed without due process of law. The whole liberty thing, in the context of the individual mandate, is a pure ideological framing concocted by small-government fanatics who want the Constitution to be some kind of libertarian scripture that it isn’t. When Justice Kennedy asks, “Can you identify for us some limits on the commerce clause?” you have to wonder where he’s getting this stuff. The Commerce Clause doesn’t have any internal limits. The limits are in the rest of the Constitution; you couldn’t pass a bill under the Commerce Clause that violated the First Amendment, for example. The Commerce Clause itself has nothing to do with balancing individual freedoms against government action. The balance is in the Constitution as a whole; you have to find some other part of the Constitution that the individual mandate violates. It’s hard to imagine that the conservative justices don’t understand this—at the very least, their clerks must. . . . The only thing that should matter in this case is whether the individual mandate regulates interstate commerce. I think it’s obvious that it does.”
3.30 President and Mrs. Obama
3.29 James Kwak in The Baseline Scenario: “Historically, the Republicans were the party of business. Businesses like to make money. That can mean a lot of different things for government policy. In some cases, they want less regulation, since regulatory compliance costs money. On the other hand, large companies often want more regulation, since they can absorb the costs of compliance better than small competitors.. . . Regulation can also be a mechanism for price fixing, as with the old Interstate Commerce Commission, which functioned as a legal cartel for railroads. Businesses definitely want lower corporate tax rates, since that increases their net income. But they also like some types of government spending. Most obviously, defense contractors like lots and lots of defense spending. Less obviously, businesses have historically been major beneficiaries of free public education, since it gave them a more skilled workforce. So in general, the business community is not obviously in favor of lower taxes or lower spending. Contrast this with the interests of billionaires. The super-rich do have a lot of wealth tied up in company stock, so to some extent they share the interests of businesses. But as rich people, they have their own interests. In this case, they unequivocally gain from lower taxes and lower government spending; they get to keep more money and they don’t need government services, as individuals. Besides, once you’ve made your first billion, it doesn’t really matter how your business does after that point. With increasing inequality and the relaxation of contribution limits, the balance of power within the Republican Party may be shifting from big business to billionaires. As USA Today reported, 25 percent of all super PAC money in this election cycle has come from five people. Furthermore, super PACs are accelerating an ongoing trend of decreasing party control over spending. Note that while major trade organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable favor government spending that supports businesses, the Club for Growth, an antitax organization, is against. As I said, I think the party will figure out a way to paper over its differences ahead of the elections in November. But in the long term, how long will it be before the business community figures out that the new Republican Party has fallen into the hands of antitax, antigovernment zealots who are willing to put low personal income tax rates ahead of high corporate profits?”
3.26 Paul Krugman in the Times: “The American Legislative Exchange Council is a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law. Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization. What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.”
3.25 Thomas Friedman in the Times: “I laugh out loud whenever I hear Obama administration officials explaining that we just need to train more Afghan soldiers to fight and then we can leave. Is there anything funnier? Afghan men need to be trained to fight? They defeated the British and the Soviets! The problem is that we turned a blind eye as President Hamid Karzai stole the election and operated a corrupt regime. Then President Obama declared that our policy was to surge U.S. troops to clear out the Taliban so “good” Afghan government could come in and take our place. There is no such government. Our problem is not that Afghans don’t know the way to fight. It is that not enough have the will to fight for the government they have. How many would fight for Karzai if we didn’t pay them?
And so it goes. In Pakistan, we pay the Pakistani Army to be two-faced, otherwise it would be only one-faced and totally against us. In Bahrain, we looked the other way while ruling Sunni hard-liners crushed a Shiite-led movement for more power-sharing, and we silently watch our ally Israel build more settlements in the West Bank that we know are a disaster for its Jewish democracy. But we don’t tell Pakistan the truth because it has nukes. We don’t tell the Saudis the truth because we’re addicted to their oil. We don’t tell Bahrain the truth because we need its naval base. We don’t tell Egypt the truth because we’re afraid it will walk from Camp David. We don’t tell Israel the truth because it has votes. And we don’t tell Karzai the truth because Obama is afraid John McCain will call him a wimp.”
3.25 D.D. Guttenplan in the Guardian: “For the right, every day is Armageddon. Obama hasn’t come close to fulfilling the radical hopes some of us allowed ourselves in 2008. But the Republicans, and the economic interests they represent, have made their dedication to “rule or ruin” abundantly clear. Even with Obama in office, they have pushed the political debate – not just on abortion and gay rights, or healthcare, but on human rights, the social safety net, and the environment – so far to the right that to pretend this election doesn’t matter is simply not a luxury we can afford.”
3.23 Levon Helm Band at Tarrytown Music Hall
3.23 President Obama on the Trayvon Martin case: “I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together — federal, state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”
3.23 Rick Santorum, at a campaign stop in Texas: “You win by giving people a choice. You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there. If they’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk of what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate for the future.”
3.22 Giants flag down, Kentucky flag up. Go Cats!
3.21 On CNN, Romney communications director Eric Fehrnstrom responded to a question about whether Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich “might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election” by saying “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”
3.21 Stephen Kaye in the Times: “Persian Gulf oil now constitutes a significantly smaller share of American oil imports than it did just 20 years ago. At the same time, domestic oil production is actually increasing after decades of decline, meaning we have to import less than before. Taken together, these trends suggest that the oil weapon, at least in the hands of Persian Gulf producers, may no longer have the same edge for the United States. According to the Energy Information Administration, in 2010 some 49 percent of American crude oil and petroleum product imports came from the Western Hemisphere — about 25 percent of that from Canada alone, making it our single largest supplier. (Other substantial hemispheric oil suppliers include Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil.) In contrast, the Persian Gulf states provided only 18 percent of our oil imports in 2010, down from 27 percent as recently as 1993.”
3.21 Jets get Tim Tebow
3.20 Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post: “Let’s rewire the whole nation, energy grid and internet, to deliver ultra-high-speed data and efficiently routed power to every home. Let’s leapfrog South Korea and other wired nations. That would be a powerful economic generator when all the work was done, it seems to me. And in the process, we’d have to tear up and rebuild a lot of infrastructure that needs refurbishing. That’s off the top of my head, but why not?”
3.19 Matthew Yglesias in Slate: “More and more newspapers are deciding that they need to charge for access to their websites rather than relying on advertising. This is often portrayed as a reversion to the print norm, where the paper is really free, but I think it’s best understood as an innovation. The price you pay to subscribe to a daily newspaper is really the price of producing and distributing the physical object. The journalism is paid for by advertising. And as the latest Pew State of the Media report observes, the business issue here isn’t that there’s no online advertising, it’s that Google is reaping all the revenue.” And it’s doing so off other people’s content!
3.19 Sofia Vergara on the cover of Esquire
3.19 David Ignatius in the Washington Post: “Bin Laden’s biggest concern was al-Qaeda’s media image among Muslims. He worried that it was so tarnished that, in a draft letter … he argued that the organization should find a new name. The al-Qaeda brand had become a problem, bin Laden explained, because Obama administration officials “have largely stopped using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims,” and instead promoted a war against al-Qaeda.. . . Bin Laden ruminated about “mistakes” and “miscalculations” by affiliates in Iraq and elsewhere that had killed Muslims, even in mosques. He told Atiyah to warn every emir, or regional leader, to avoid these “unnecessary civilian casualties,” which were hurting the organization. “Making these mistakes is a great issue,” he stressed, arguing that spilling “Muslim blood” had resulted in “the alienation of most of the nation [of Islam] from the [Mujaheddin].”
3.16 Spoke before The Group, in Pleasantville
3.13 From The Washington Post: “Ed Rogers, a Republican consultant and Alabama native, put it more bluntly. “None of them hit the sweet spot,” he said of the GOP field. “None of the candidates are story tellers, none take football seriously, none are Protestant and nobody really has a favorite country music singer.”
3.12 47% of GOP in Alabama, 53% of Republicans in Mississippi believe Obama is a Muslim.
3.8 Harold Meyerson in the Post: “The weakness of this year’s Republican field is chiefly a refraction of the weakness of the Republican electorate. Republicans want a candidate who channels their rage at Obama and the unfamiliar America — economically stagnant and increasingly multi-racial — over which he presides. They want a candidate who will turn the clock back to the economics, demographics and verities of an earlier — if needs be, mythic — time. These are not tasks that serious leaders embrace. In the absence of serious leaders, we have Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul.”
3.10 Hillary Clinton at the Women in the World Summit: “Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies. Yes, it is hard to believe that even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”
3.8 Charles Murray in the Times: “I can see four steps that might weaken the isolation of at least the children of the new upper class. For one thing, we should get rid of unpaid internships. The children of the new upper class hardly ever get real jobs during summer vacation. Instead, they get internships at places like the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute (where I work) or a senator’s office. It amounts to career assistance for rich, smart children. Those from the middle and working class, struggling to pay for college, can’t afford to work for free. Internships pave the way for children to move seamlessly from their privileged upbringings to privileged careers without ever holding a job that is boring or physically demanding. So let the labor unions win this one: If you are not a religious organization and have more than 10 employees, the minimum wage law should apply . . . We can also drop the SAT in college admissions decisions. The test has become a symbol of new-upper-class privilege, as people assume (albeit wrongly) that high scores are purchased through the resources of private schools and expensive test preparation programs. Instead, elite colleges should require achievement tests in specific subjects for which students can prepare the old-fashioned way, by hitting the books. Another step would replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action. This is a no-brainer. It is absurd, in 2012, to give the son of a black lawyer an advantage in college admissions but not do the same for the son of a white plumber. Finally, we should prick the B.A. bubble. The bachelor’s degree has become a driver of class divisions at the same moment in history when it has become educationally meaningless.”
3.4 William Johnson in the Times: “How, then, should we measure students and teachers? In ninth grade, my students learn about the scientific method. They learn that in order to collect good data, scientists control for specific variables and test their impact on otherwise identical environments. If you give some students green fields, glossy textbooks and lots of attention, you can’t measure them against another group of students who lack all of these things. It’s bad science.”
3.4 George Will on This Week: “Boehner said that Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using a salad fork for your entree — that is inappropriate. Rick Santorum says, ‘Well, what he said was absurd and an entertainer is allowed to absurd.’ No, it is the responsibilities of conservatives to police the right excesses on their side just as the liberals unfailingly fail on their own side. . . .Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. “They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”
3.3 Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student who supported President Obama‘s position mandating contraception coverage, was called a slut by Rush Limbaugh. “What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.” Later, he added, “If we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” After Obama called Fluke to offer his support, Limbaugh saif the Democrats were using Fluke as a political pawn for fund-raising. ““The Democrats are desperate. This is all they’ve got, is to go out and try to discredit their critics, to impugn and discredit the people who disagree with them.”
3.3 Montana Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull, a George W. Bush nominee, apologized for a racist email he sent to friends implying Obama’s mother had sex with a dog. Wrote Cebull: “I sincerely and profusely apologize to you and your family for the email I forwarded. I accept full responsibility; I have no one to blame but myself.” Cebull added that the action will “never happen again.” In the email, Cebull wrote “A little boy said to his mother; ‘Mommy, how come I’m black and you’re white?’ His mother replied, ‘Don’t even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you’re lucky you don’t bark!’” Cebull said that he referred his conduct to the Judicial Council of the Ninth Circuit. “Honestly, I don’t know what else I can do.”
3.2 Paul Krugman in the Times: “all four significant Republican presidential candidates still standing are fiscal phonies. They issue apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of government debt and, in the name of deficit reduction, demand savage cuts in programs that protect the middle class and the poor. But then they propose squandering all the money thereby saved — and much, much more — on tax cuts for the rich. And nobody should be surprised. It has been obvious all along, to anyone paying attention, that the politicians shouting loudest about deficits are actually using deficit hysteria as a cover story for their real agenda, which is top-down class warfare. To put it in Romneyesque terms, it’s all about finding an excuse to slash programs that help people who like to watch Nascar events, even while lavishing tax cuts on people who like to own Nascar teams.”
3.2 David Frum on the Daily Beast: “My very conservative friend John Vecchione jokes about the impending Romney nomination: “I feel like the bride in an arranged marriage I cannot escape.” After Tuesday’s votes, escape will become that much harder. The resistance remains. But it becomes more futile. . . .Romney emerges from Michigan committed not only to the Ryan plan, but also to a 20% cut in tax rates, above and beyond his prior commitment to making the Bush tax cuts permanent. He emerges as the candidate who has endorsed the idea that President Obama is waging war on religion as never before seen in this country, not even when the prophet of Romney’s faith was murdered and his own family driven into exile. He emerges above all as a candidate who has distanced himself from his own most signal achievement in government, his Massachusetts healthcare plan, and identified himself with America’s financial elite in almost every regard.”
3.1 Amid Capeci dies at 51. A good guy.Terrible to see him go so young. Here is with the lovely Rachel Clarke, back in the Esquire days.
3.1 In the Washington Post, Matt Miller quotes Bob Kerrey: “Bob Kerrey told me once that a campaign is not the time to try to convince voters of anything they don’t already believe. A campaign is about showing how your values align with theirs. “In a political campaign it’s too risky to lead them,” Kerrey said. “And so what you do is pretend to lead while basically you’re trying to follow their opinions.”
3.1 In the Post, Jonathan Capehart quotes from a study from the Center for an Urban Future on the cost of living in New York City: “Income levels that would enable a very comfortable lifestyle in other locales barely suffice to provide the basics in New York City. . . .Given the vastly higher cost of living in New York City, however, it is doubtful that any New York household that earns even $60,000 per year enjoys a quality of life that remotely approaches what we typically imagine as “middle class.” The “New York City premium” on goods and services from housing and groceries to utilities and transportation means that a $60,000 salary earned in Manhattan is the equivalent of making $26,092 in Atlanta; $31,124 in Miami; and $35,405 in Boston. In less-expensive Queens, that same $60,000 salary carries only as much purchasing power as $37,451 in Atlanta, $44,673 in Miami, or $50,819 in Boston.”
2.29 Davy Jones of The Monkees dies at 66. Now I’m a Bereaver.
2.29 Paul Begala in the Daily Beast: “Mitt Romney barely winning a primary in his home state is like Charlie Sheen barely winning a primary in a Hooters. Sure, it’s a win, but the fact that it was close is more than embarrassing—it’s mortifying.”
2.28 Bill Keller on Morning Joe: “I find…this whole campaign has been one of those little cars that come out in the circus. One clown comes out and another clown comes out and you can’t believe there are any more clowns to get out. And they keep coming.”
2.26 The Artist wins Best Picture. Meryl Streep wins Best Actress for The Iron Lady. Angelina Jolie‘s leg steals the show.
2.25 Rick Santorum at the Americans for Prosperity forum in Troy MI: “Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands. .?.?. President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.”
2.20 Paul Krugman in the Times: “What will it take to convince the Pain Caucus, the people on both sides of the Atlantic who insist that we can cut our way to prosperity, that they are wrong? After all, the usual suspects were quick to pronounce the idea of fiscal stimulus dead for all time after President Obama’s efforts failed to produce a quick fall in unemployment — even though many economists warned in advance that the stimulus was too small. Yet as far as I can tell, austerity is still considered responsible and necessary despite its catastrophic failure in practice. The point is that we could actually do a lot to help our economies simply by reversing the destructive austerity of the last two years. That’s true even in America, which has avoided full-fledged austerity at the federal level but has seen big spending and employment cuts at the state and local level. Remember all the fuss about whether there were enough “shovel ready” projects to make large-scale stimulus feasible? Well, never mind: all the federal government needs to do to give the economy a big boost is provide aid to lower-level governments, allowing these governments to rehire the hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers they have laid off and restart the building and maintenance projects they have canceled. Look, I understand why influential people are reluctant to admit that policy ideas they thought reflected deep wisdom actually amounted to utter, destructive folly. But it’s time to put delusional beliefs about the virtues of austerity in a depressed economy behind us.”
2.20 Carneval in Brazil, as usual.
2.19 Dinner with the Lindstroms at Mediterraneo.
2.18 Yanks trade AJ Burnett to the Pirates. “I’m not one to lie or point fingers. Did I produce during the season? No. Did I have good games when we needed? Yeah. It is what it is.”
2.18 Saw Aretha Franklin at Radio City Music Hall.
2.18 New Jersey legislature approves gay marriage, but Chris Christie vetoes; says he’ll send the matter to a referendum, which is a cowardly move.
2.17 At a hearing Thursday convened by Rep. Darrell Issa, five male witnesses, all religious leaders, explained why the regulation still assaults their religious beliefs. When Democrats asked Issa to invite some female witnesses, he said the debate was about religious freedom, not “reproductive rights and contraception.” Before storming out, Rep. Carolyn Maloney demanded, “Where are the women?”
2.17 Gary Carter, Hall of Fame catcher of the 1986 New York Mets, dies at 57. “I was our last hope,” he wrote, “and as I took my place and looked out at Schiraldi, all sounds shrank back, and I felt a presence in me, or perhaps besides me, a calming certainty that I wasn’t alone. I was not alone, and I was not, so help me, going to make the last out of the World Series. I felt certain of that.”
2.16 Rick Santorum on contraception: “One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea… It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal… but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that’s not for purposes of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can’t you take other parts of that out? And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure. And that’s certainly a part of it–and it’s an important part of it, don’t get me wrong–but there’s a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special. Again, I know most presidents don’t talk about those things, and maybe people don’t want us to talk about those things, but I think it’s important that you are who you are. I’m not running for preacher. I’m not running for pastor, but these are important public policy issues.”
2.15 Spoke about the Monitor and the Merrimac at the CWFMNY.
2.15 Fareed Zakaria in the Post: “In the end, however, the global revolutionaries in Moscow, the mad autocrats in Pyongyang and the terrorist-supporting military in Pakistan have all been deterred by mutual fears of destruction. While the Iranian regime is often called crazy, it has done much less to merit the term than did a regime such as Mao’s China. Over the past decade, there have been thousands of suicide bombings by Saudis, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Pakistanis, but not been a single suicide attack by an Iranian. Is the Iranian regime — even if it got one crude device in a few years — likely to launch the first? “Israel is finally confronting the sort of choices the United States and Great Britain confronted more than six decades ago,” says Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs. “Hopefully it, too, will come to recognize that absolute security is impossible to achieve in the nuclear age, and that if its enemies’ nuclear programs cannot be delayed or disrupted, deterrence is less disastrous than preventive war.”
2.15 Linsanity, Day 7
2.13 Linsanity reaches a sixth game, as Jeremy Lin leads the wandering Knicks to the sixth straight victory, this time with a three point shot with less than a second left.2.13 Paul Krugman in the Times: On Friday, Mitt Romney told “the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.” As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.”
2.12 19 year-old Kate Upton, 36-24-34, graces the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. “We would never use her,” said Sophia Neophitou of Victoria’ Secret told the Times, although in fact Upton has modeled for the company’s catalog. “Her look is too obvious. She’s like a Page 3 girl. She’s like a footballer’s wife, with the too-blond hair and that kind of face that anyone with enough money can go out and buy.”
2.12 Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic: “Owing to medical advancements, cancer deaths now peak at age 65 and kill off just 20 percent of older Americans, while deaths due to organ failure peak at about 75 and kill off just another 25 percent, so the norm for seniors is becoming a long, drawn-out death after 85, requiring ever-increasing assistance for such simple daily activities as eating, bathing, and moving. This is currently the case for approximately 40 percent of Americans older than 85, the country’s fastest-growing demographic, which is projected to more than double by 2035, from about 5 million to 11.5 million. And at that point, here comes the next wave—77 million of the youngest Baby Boomers will be turning 70.”
2.12 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: “You know how in Scrabble sometimes you look at your seven letters and you’ve got only vowels that spell nothing? What do you do? You go back to the pile. You throw your letters back and hope to pick up better ones to work with. That’s what Republican primary voters seem to be doing. They just keep going back to the pile but still coming up with only vowels that spell nothing. There’s a reason for that: Their pile is out of date. The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub. Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions.. . . Since such a transformed Republican Party is highly unlikely, maybe the best thing would be for it to get crushed in this election and forced into a fundamental rethink — something the Democrats had to go through when they lost three in a row between 1980 and 1988. We need a “Different Kind of Republican” the way Bill Clinton gave us a “Different Kind of Democrat.”
2.11 Whitney Houston dies at 48.
2.10 Paul Krugman in the Times: “The truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Charles Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised? Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men. Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.
2.7 Rick Santorum wins t”hree primaries. Republican race thoroughly confused.

2.5 Giants Win!
2.3 Ben Gazarra dies at 81. One less witness to my John Scanlon birthday routine remains.
2.3 Denise Chow on space.com: “A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star. The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface. “It’s the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it’s not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. “It’s right smack in the habitable zone — there’s no question or discussion about it. It’s not on the edge, it’s right in there.” . . .The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion). “This is basically our next-door neighbor,” Vogt said. “It’s very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one.”
2.2 I found this wonderful photo of the wonderful Jennifer Morrison, from last August’s Vanity Fair. Sigh.
2.2 Jacob Weisberg in Slate: “Even more than Gore and Kerry, Romney is running away from his own perfection. He must grapple with the affliction of excessive handsomeness, mussing his hair just so before appearances to avoid looking like a television anchorman. He struggles to seem ordinary despite his riches. But anything Romney does to downplay his wealth merely highlights the vastness of a personal fortune estimated at more than $250 million. And for the time being, at least, Romney must disguise his reasonableness, his record of businesslike practicality and ideological moderation. The number of people who can sympathize with such problems is rather small.”
2.1 Jonah Goldberg in National Review: “Romney’s simply not a good enough politician. He may be the most electable on paper. He’s certainly a nice guy, decent father, smart, successful etc. But, every time he seems to get into his groove and pull away he says things that make people think he doesn’t know how to play the game. That can be reassuring to some, who take it as proof he’s not another politician. The problem, for others at least, is that because he isn’t a natural politician he breaks the language where it needs to bend. He uses language — “I like to fire people!” “It’s nothing to get angry about” etc — that doesn’t make him seem like an unconventional politician. Rather his language makes him seem like a caricature of a conventionally stiff country club Republican. A case in point, here he is this morning talking about how he’s “not very concerned about the very poor”. I get the point he’s making. It’s a point that Bill Clinton won the presidency with — but with language that attracted voters. Romney’s language won’t do anything of the sort. And the concern is, after nearly a decade of running for president, if he can’t get this stuff down now he never will.”
2.1 First look at the Skyfall James Bond.
2.1 Mitt Romney said today “I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich; they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” I’m not concerned with the very poor?
1.30 Paul Krugman in the Times: “Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground. Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy. And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.”
1.29 Gail Collins in the Times: “Do you think that after all is said and done, Newt Gingrich will just go down in history as the politician who conclusively proved that voters don’t care about a candidate’s sexual misbehavior?”
1.27 David Brooks in the Times: “This election is about averting national decline. The president is making a mistake in ceding the size advantage to the Republicans. The Republicans at least speak with epic alarm about the nation’s problems. They are unified behind big tax and welfare state reforms that would purge Washington and shake things up. The president is making a mistake in running a Sunset Boulevard campaign: I am big; it’s my presidency that got small.”
1.26 Newt Gingrich in Mt. Dora FL: ““We are not going to defeat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he thinks the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together to figure out what this is all about.”
1.26 David Ignatius in the Post: “In every GOP debate, you hear insistent calls for a restoration of U.S. power from Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. They evoke a lost Arcadia and suggest that the United States can reclaim its exceptional status as a “city on a hill,” towering above other nations. The specific GOP prescriptions mostly involve muscle-flexing: more military pressure on Iran; more CIA covert action against Iran, Syria and other rivals; tougher trade policies toward China. The implicit theme is that President Obama’s efforts to mend fences with allies and work through the United Nations are signs of weakness — and that a strong America must lead from the front. The problem with the GOP version is that America is already muscle-bound to a fault. To exercise power effectively, it needs good allies. . . .The GOP candidates sometimes seem disdainful of global realpolitik, and they voice the romantic, go-it-alone ethos of the neoconservative wing of the party. Romney, for example, dismissed the idea of negotiating peace with the Taliban — a position even some of his own advisers reject. On the Middle East, Gingrich disdains the two-state solution that every other major nation (including Israel) favors — calling the Palestinians an “invented” people who, presumably, don’t deserve a state. That kind of rhetoric is so far outside the mainstream that it’s the strategic equivalent of walking off the plank.”
1.25 The hard-nosed Jorge Posada retires.
1.25 Dana Milbank in the Post: “On the very day Obama gave his call to class warfare, the former speaker, whose allies had already branded Mitt Romney a job-destroying “predatory capitalist,” successfully goaded the former Massachusetts governor into releasing tax returns that reveal him to be making millions of dollars per year from investments and paying paltry tax rates — while tucking money in the Cayman Islands, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock and a Swiss bank account. Gingrich exulted Tuesday that the already rich Romney is “getting richer off Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Romney, suddenly faltering in his bid for the nomination, found himself declaring in Florida on Tuesday that “banks aren’t bad people.” He continued to characterize Gingrich as an “influence peddler,” a tool of K Street and an exorbitantly compensated Freddie Mac lobbyist. Gingrich’s campaign, in turn, answered with the implausible claim that it “can’t find” all of the lucrative contracts the candidate had with Freddie. (Did they look under the sofa cushions?) Obama strategist David Axelrod couldn’t have arranged it better: Republicans helpfully turned themselves into fat-cat foils for Obama, staging all-out war between the Gingrich haves and the Romney have-mores.”
1.24 Jon Stewart on the Daily Show: “How in the world do you — Mitt Romney– justify making more in one day than the median American family makes in a year while paying an effective tax rate of the guy who scans your shoes at the airport?”
1.24 Meeting with Mark Reiter
1.22 Giants beat the 49ers 20-17 on a Lawrence Tynes field goal in OT, win NFC Championship, head for the Super Bowl.
1.20 Etta James dies.
1.19 Paul Begala in the Daily Beast on Rick Perry‘s withdrawal: “Perry is a dope, and now all the world knows it. If he lives to be 100 he will be remembered for his “Oops” moment—when he couldn’t recall the three government agencies he wanted to abolish. To be sure, even the smartest of people can have a brain freeze, but Perry’s cerebrum has been on dry ice for decades. The pride of Texas A&M can now slink back home, defeated and disgraced, where he can try to explain to the lobbyists and billionaires who funded his campaign how he squandered a huge fortune and blew a big lead. In the most modestly gifted field in memory, Perry stood out. His incoherent debate performances, his weird, rambling, giddy speech in New Hampshire, his embarrassingly low vote totals, will define him for the rest of his career.”
1.18 In the Times: “Romney also characterized as “not very much” the $374,327 he reported earning in speaking fees last year, though that sum would, by itself, very nearly catapult most American families into the top 1 percent of the country’s earners.”
1.17 David Brooks in the Times: “Republican audiences this year want a restoration. America once had strong values, they believe, but we have gone astray. We’ve got to go back and rediscover what we had. Heads nod enthusiastically every time a candidate touches this theme. I agree with the sentiment, but it makes for an incredibly backward-looking campaign. I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.”
1.17 From Anthony Trollope, courtesy Regina Sokas: “a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.”
>1.15 The Giants beat the Packers, 37-20, in a game that wasn’t that close. Key play: Eli Manning‘s Hail Mary TD pass to Hakeen Nicks at the half.
1.11 Mitt Romney, talking to Matt Lauer on The Today Show: “”I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. I think when you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99 percent vs. 1 percent, and those people who’ve been most successful will be in the 1 percent, you’ve opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.” LAUER: “Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy, though?” ROMNEY: “You know I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms. But the president has made this part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach.”
1.11 Paul Begala in the Daily Beast: “You gotta hand it to the Mittbot 3.0. With all the charisma of a foreclosure agent and all the charm of a calculator, Mitt Romney rolled to a win in New Hampshire, a state in which one of Mitt’s many mansions sits—and right next door to Massachusetts. Given those advantages, Romney looks weak even when he wins. Sure, he managed to surpass his 2008 total in New Hampshire (75,546 votes). But look at his competition this time! The field is so weak it would make a lame old plowhorse look like Secretariat. None of Romney’s opponents ran a significant number of negative ads against him in New Hampshire. It’s pretty easy to look bulletproof when your enemies are shooting blanks. Yes, Jon Huntsman ran a “comparative ad” that was weaker than baby’s pee. And, yes, Newt Gingrich body-slammed Romney in the Meet the Press debate, essentially calling him a liar and demanding he “cut the pious baloney.” But no one hit him right between the eyes with the kinds of ads Hillary and Barack used, let alone the carpet-bombing Romney’s allies used against Gingrich in Iowa.”
1.10 Looks like Santorum might have actually won Iowa.
1.10 Richard Cohen in The Washington Post: “Lately, Romney has been on something of an insincerity tear. This son of a big-state governor, this Harvard Law School graduate, this multimillionaire, this hunk with the voice of an AM radio weatherman (“Good morning, Southland!”) has been portraying himself as an average guy. He said, for instance, that he, too, knows a bit about job insecurity.I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired,” he said the other day in New Hampshire. “There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.” His campaign has been unable or unwilling to document those instances. . . .Similarly, Romney has adopted an aw-shucks pose about his presidential ambitions. His father ran for president in 1968, and Mitt himself must have declared pre-natally. This is the second time around for him . . .Yet, Romney is capable of looking all of New Hampshire straight in the eye and saying, “I have to tell you: This chance to run for president of the United States, I never imagined I’d do it. This is just a very strange and unusual thing to be in the middle of.” He added: “I mean, I was just a high school kid like everybody else with skinny legs. And, you know, I imagined that I’d be, you know, in business all my career. And somehow I backed into the chance to do this.” He backed into it by running for governor of Massachusetts, and he backed into it some more by running for senator from the same state. In my experience, if you back and back with a certain goal in mind you can no longer call it backing. It is forwarding, as in Sherman’s march to the sea. Romney’s campaign has been a bloody slog, and there has been nothing extemporaneous or serendipitous or even fun about it.”
1.9 Mitt Romney at the Nashua Chamber of Commerce: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
1.9 Bill Keller in the Times: “Hillary Clinton is 64 years old, with a Calvinist work ethic, the stamina of an Olympian, an E.Q. to match her I.Q., and the political instincts of a Clinton. She has an impressive empathic ability — invaluable in politics or statecraft — to imagine how the world looks to an ally or adversary. She listens, and she learns from her mistakes. She was a perfectly plausible president four years ago, and that was before she demonstrated her gifts as a diplomatic snake-charmer. (Never mind Pakistan and Libya, I’m talking about the Obama White House.) She is, says Gallup, the most admired woman in America for the 10th year in a row, laps ahead of, in order, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin and Condoleezza Rice; her approval rating of 64 percent is the highest of any political figure in the country.”
1.8 In an unbelievable 75 yard strike in the first play of overtime, the Tim Tebows top the heavily-favored Steelers, 29-23.
1.8 In a game highlighted by long strikes and two staunch stops on fourth-and-one, the Giants stomp the Falcons, 24-2.
1.8 Spoke about And the War Came at the Briarcliff Manor Historical Society.
1.8 Tony Blankley dies.
1.7 Lunch with Will Leitch at the Downtown Bar and Grill in gentrified Bouerem Hill.
1.6 Nice movie night with the girls (including the one with the Dragon Tattoo.)
1.5 Nice dinner with the family at Mediterraneo.
1.5 As Rick Santorum told CaffeinatedThoughts.com in October, “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Santorum has also pledged to completely defund federal funding for contraception if elected president.
1.4 Tim Howard became the fourth goalkeeper to score in Premier League history, when he landed a wind-blown clearance from about 100 yards. Despite the goal, Everton lost 2-1. “I was delighted that we were in the lead and would hopefully go on to get three points, but it’s not a nice feeling for a keeper. It’s really awful actually,” Howard told Sky Sports.
1.4 Molly is accepted by SUNY Purchase. Yay!
1.3 Romney beats Santorum in the Iowa caucuses by 8 votes.
1.2 In the Winter Classic, the Flyers lost to the Rangers, 3-2.
1.1 In an exciting win or go home game, The Giants beat the Cowboys, 31-14.