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February 2012 Archives
Oh, oh, call on me! Call on me!!! In her first question at her first budget committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) asked the Medicare actuary how much...
Over at PostPartisan, I'm arguing today that Romney is underrated, and actually has important political skills. I don't think it's just luck that he's emerged as the almost-certain nominee. Projecting...
“Climate conspiracy, meet Occam’s razor.” In a tweeted graphic with that headline, Brooke Jarvis pretty much renders further words on the former, and further illustrations of the latter, irrelevant: Via...
…should there be a two-way race for the Senate seat (and that’s by no means a sure thing), Republicans will need a candidate who can run as a Snowe Republican....
The most important fact about contemporary American politics is that the Republican party has become an extremist organization, in which what used to be the fringe is now the base.The...
Matt Glassman has a really good point that there's a real difference between talking about a "dark horse" candidate and talking about a potential deadlocked convention. He's right: these two...
I had an online op-ed in the New York Times yesterday, lamenting Rick Santorum’s efforts to make intellectual and developmental disabilities yet another front in the culture wars. My wife...
Given my research interests in Russian politics, I will offer my own pre-election report on the March 4, 2012 first round of the Russian presidential elections. I will, however, do...
The highly-controversial New York City teacher value-added scores released last week are being presented by the New York Times with substantial margins of error. And in the end, understanding and...
It seems like the Netherlands has emerged as the exemplar of all that is wrong with modern secular liberalism. First there was Fox News’ campaign against the free love,...
I very much like Jonathan Chait's piece yesterday about Mitt Romney's new tax plan, which as Chait says makes it clear that Republicans will once again ignore -- and explode...
That’s the title of Lynn Vavreck’s and my latest post at Model Politics. We compare Obama, Romney and Santorum in terms of how voters perceive their personal wealth and their...
Over at Plum Line I have a quick reaction to Romney's nice night in Michigan and Arizona. Just to add a bit to what I said over there... I think...
I wrote about this a while ago, but a tweet just now reminded me: InTrade's current market for "brokered convention" is absolutely insane. It's now at 20%, which is approximately...
In James Fallows’s interesting take on the Obama presidency, he discusses the notion that Obama is “cold.” He refers to this as one of “Barack Obama’s particular versions of the...
From time to time I run into a charge that I or someone supporting some seemingly non-market policy or other “just want to redistribute income (or wealth).” Something like that...
The blogosphere is unnecessarily puzzled by Mitt Romney’s repeated claims, to audiences of Michigan Republicans, that The trees are the right height. I explained all this a fortnight ago. The...
Rick Santorum’s latest effort to prove he’s in the mainstream is an accusation that Barack Obama wants kids to go to college because…American colleges are “indoctrination mills” and they’ll all...
According to Mitt Romney’s website, his plan for Medicare hasn’t changed much since I reacted to it last year. I refer you to these two posts. But it has changed...
I’m one month in another three-month commitment I’ve made with myself to do Weight Watchers (more on that later). One of the things the program always seems to reinforce with...
Waiting for a flight at an airport can be a dull and lonely thing. Sitting at a half-empty terminal last week, these costs evaporated when I noticed that the guy...
Driving to Charlottesville recently for a talk at U. Va., I got to listen to a local radio show focused on the ultrasound bill. Turns out that Jon Stewart wasn’t...
When JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon appeared before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, he testified that he told his daughter a financial crisis is something that...
As we go through life, we sometimes have the fortune to encounter people who are similar to ourselves in some respects, but older than we are at the present moment....
Have you heard the one about the wild White House conspiracy with the press to trip up Republicans on birth control? If you were watching the debate Wednesday night, you...
Given the discussions recently on the need to cut entitlements, and the inability to recognize so much spending as entitlements, it’s inevitable that eventually we will get back to discussing...
Nate Silver made the case this past Sunday in the NYT Magazine that Barack Obama will run a populist campaign because, all else equal, it works best for him in...
Stephanie Hegarty writes that requiring eight, unbroken hours of sleep is a myth. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were...
By all accounts, Mitt Romney is a smart businessman with a sophisticated understanding of how economies work. So why is he so tied up in knots over basic questions of...
I have an item up at PostPartisan talking about third party candidates, but it also gives me an excuse to try again to debunk the myth that Ross Perot was...
Perhaps my biggest frustration with the U.S. news media (and yes, I am a card-carrying member) is that we permit the two parties to decide what is “left” and what...
Ken Kizer’s recent Journal of the American Medical Association piece is a quick way to get up to speed on what the Affordable Care Act could mean for the Veterans...
Any chance Rick Santorum will give up bigotry for Lent? [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]...
After reading a transcript of the Republican debate last night, I think the media should ask a very simple question:“Leaving aside questions of government policy and abortion, do you personally...
Ezra Klein yesterday had a terrific overview of why corporate -- and individual -- tax reform is so difficult. Part of this is a classic collective action problem. The advantage...
The First Cornerstone of value-driven healthcare is widespread adoption of interoperable HIT [health information technology] to facilitate, among other things, reducing medical errors, enhancing the provision of evidence-based healthcare, and...
In a blogpost in July of last year, David Graeber talked about why he wrote Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The aim of the book was, indeed, to write the...
Maybe anyone who voluntarily runs the gantlet we call our presidential election process must be mentally imbalanced in some respect, but this year’s crop of Republican candidates has been especially...
Jeffrey Goldberg makes a reasonable point concerning Republican presidential candidates who believe that Iran is a weakness for Barack Obama -- that Obama has been "tougher" on Iran than George W....
Listen up, class! In the last 48 hours: 1) Rick Santorum has compared Barack Obama to Hitler while comparing prenatal testing to eugenics; 2) Mitt Romney has warned that cutting...
First the bad news: In summary, even if one cannot easily assign a cause of death among persons with HBV, HCV, or HIV infection, approximately 16 000 deaths among HCV-...
Matt Drudge has now picked up the Right Wing Watch story about Rick Santorum’s speech at Ave Maria University. That has brought the speech to the intention of Red bloggers...
Continuing the series, here’s another zombie idea: negative advertising “works.” Either by hurting the candidate who is attacked or by turning off voters from the campaign altogether. The sheer volume...
New polling research out late last week shows exactly the mess that Republicans have made for themselves on taxes. A YouGov study by political scientists Gregory Huber, Conor Dowling, and...
All the press coverage over Rick Santorum’s idiotic suggestions that mainline Protestants aren’t Christians, or that President Obama isn’t a Christian, or that prenatal care increases abortion rates, or that...
We’ve long argued this meme isn’t true. But now it’s explicitly false: Last year, about 80,000 emergency-room patients at hospitals owned by HCA, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, left...
By Zack Weiner via @pckilgore. [Cross-posted at The Incidental Economist]...
The Obama Administration hasn’t even promulgated its new compromise contraception rule, and already plaintiffs are rushing in to challenge it. Since the regulation isn’t even out yet, these challenges will...
A reader points me to the group, Why Tuesday, that wants to move Election Day to a more convenient time. They write: Today, we are an urban society, and we...
In 1932, Herbert Hoover suffered a humiliating defeat in his race for reelection. Winning 59 electoral votes and carrying six states, his loss was one of the worst for a...
Question for those who believe that requiring coverage of reproductive health services in employer-paid health insurance plans is a violation of religious freedom if it applies to employers such as...
From What We Talk about When We Talk about Health Care Costs, by Peter J. Neumann: The problem is that no one in charge seems willing to acknowledge that getting...
Political Scientist Josh Putnam, who blogs at Frontloading Headquarters and who may know more about delegate selection than anyone, was interviewed on Fresh Air. Here’s one quote from him: The...
A commenter writes: A lot of people think that the Republican Party is heading towards irrelevancy demographically because of its increasing trend to the right unless there's some kind of...
The Washington Post has a long piece by Jason Horowitz about Helen Radkey, an extraordinarily unpleasant woman who, having been excommunicated from Mormonism, spends her life trying to embarrass the...
Presidents Day is a terrible idea for a holiday. Just an awful idea. In this republic, there's absolutely no good reason to take a day to honor our presidents. On...
I admit that I’ve found Mr. Santorum’s unlikely rise rather amusing. He would self-immolate in the general election. I’ve never expected him to do more than make mischief for Romney....
I've never been much of a conspiracy theorist as it is not my inclination to see evil lurking behind every bush (no pun intended.) More times than not, things are—for...
Here’s a truly odd observation from the usually-excellent Marc Ambinder. Writing about Jeremy Lin, Asian-Americans, and the Republican Party, Ambinder argues: If Republicans were to rid themselves of their anti-immigrant...
Charles Murray, author of Loosing Ground, a declaration against welfare, and Bell Curve, a book that invoked racial controversies, is back. In his new book, Coming Apart, he proposes that...
During the 1928 presidential campaign, nutty right-wing Protestants claimed that Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party, was planning to extend New York’s Holland Tunnel...
Matthew Yglesias proposes that employers should tackle problems of skill shortages themselves. On a firm level obviously one solution here is to just pay higher wages and hire away someone...
Did the the contraception contretemps hurt Obama’s standing among Catholic voters? Despite endless speculation about this, evidence has been in short supply. With some newly released data from YouGov, I...
John Sides and Larry Bartels have recently spent some space explaining the “political science” view of social class and voting in American politics, in contrast to the claims of journalists...
During a presidential debate in 1984, Ronald Reagan, who was then 73, famously said of his opponent, Walter Mondale, who was then 56 and trying to make an issue of...
Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) have introduced The Seniors’ Choice Act. It includes a variant of premium support and a whole lot more. As with all these...
House Republicans looked pretty bad yesterday when their morning panel about the Affordable Care Act’s contraception regulations failed to include a single woman. But then Republicans argued that it really...
Sarah Kliff thinks so, reporting in the Washington Post that the health care expansion envisioned in the Affordable Care Act will require an expansion of doctor supply as well. She...
I am thrilled to see the number of posts that have been generated by my original question regarding whether or not Romney is likely to have a military problem (see...
In recent years, many top universities have tried to guide their students into careers other than finance. In 2008, Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, went so far...
Sean Trende tries to find a way to make a deadlocked* convention pan out by looking at the past for examples, but I think I see where he goes wrong,...
One of the commenters on John Sides’s “Zombie Politics” post notes that Jonathan Chait has a new piece applauding George Packer, doubting Sides (and Bartels), then transitioning to a discussion of...
Tim Mak artfully skewers bad political writing at Politico. He nails 7 clichés and makes a sly joke by putting an eighth in his title (“very tired cliches”… are there...
Catch of the day goes to Rachel Maddow. The liberal talk show host went off on a diatribe against Politifact after it rated "Mostly True" a claim by Marco Rubio...
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping is in the United States this week for a courtesy call and, sure enough, there has been plenty of courtesy on display. The obligatory rhetorical...
With a tip of the hat to Paul Krugman, and leaving out the fairly obvious one of praising Romneycare while bashing the Affordable Care Act... March: Barack Obama’s budget wastes...
I’ve often written on the shortage of physicians in the US. Recently, Sarah Kliff posted on the upcoming debacle that might result if we don’t soon increase the numbers of...
That’s Rick Santorum talking about the American welfare state. But who, really, is hooked—and how does that matter politically? Yesterday’s New York Times featured a long, meaty article on the...
Kevin Drum notes that David Brooks fears the sky is falling ("Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at...
Death panels are fine, as long as employers control them. [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]...
There's a bunch of new, good stuff out there speculating about Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and exactly where the GOP race is now. I recommend Steve Kornacki, Ed Kilgore, and...
Zombie politics—a play on Zombie Economics—refers to ideas about politics that have become so cemented in conventional wisdom that it is virtually impossible to dislodge them. It doesn’t matter what...
At the end of a superb take-down of the Catholic bishops’ hypocrisy on social and economic issues, Andrew Sullivan notes, They have become the Pharisees. And we need Jesus. Foul!...
A reader has suggested some reply to the economics-themed valentines that Justin Wolfers summarizes here. I made a half-hearted stab and then realized, “Hey, let’s make this a contest!” Leave...
And it's not just any version of Arizona Statehood Day -- it's the centennial. Arizona, b. 1912. Still younger than Ronald Reagan. As I've said, I've always been proud of...
Via USA Today. [Cross-posted at The Incidental Economist]...
Last week, Ryan Avent noted that the economies of swing states were growing more rapidly than other states. He suggests that this may help negate the fact that many swing...
[Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]...
The big budget news today (other than the president's submitted FY 2013 budget) is that Republicans have apparently surrendered on the big extenders bill. They'll apparently (yes, I said it...
This NYT story shows that, even as the racial gap in educational attainment has been shrinking, the income-class gap has been growing. Note how huge the gap is: “one unit”...
Romney won the Maine caucuses and the CPAC straw poll, and the Washington Post tells us: Coupled with his victory in Saturday’s straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference...
From Andrew Sullivan: The untimely death of the great Whitney Houston cannot but provoke intense sadness. No.The deaths of more than 25,000 children in the Somalian famine and brutality cannot...
I noted here that Romney garnered a lower proportion of all votes cast in the 2012 Iowa caucus than he did in 2008 (though only 0.5% fewer votes in absolute...
Via Wonkette, I'm not sure what to make of this: We've got Space Nazis, always a winning presence, and Sarah Palin can only improve things. It looks to be aiming...
As far as I can tell, the Obama Administration is offering the perfect phony solution to the phony problem of employers whose “consciences” require them to deprive their female employees...
As we are in the thick of election season, it’s a great time to recommend R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor’s revealing 1996 documentary “A Perfect Candidate“. The scene is...
It’s been going on for too long, right before our eyes. Inevitably, someone was going to blow the whistle, and wouldn’t you know it would be Felix Salmon, the famous...
When the Romney slime, and the Romney Super-Pac slime, start to hit Rick Santorum, he’s going to need some responses. And the best defense is a good offense. So here,...
National Journal's Reid Wilson says that after the vote-counting flubs in Nevada and Iowa, caucuses are and should be on their way out. Josh Putnam demolishes the "are" part of...
Chris Blattman has an idea to effectively cap the amount of money going into presidential campaigns, which is hard to do now under Court findings from Buckley to Citizens United:...
There are times I wish I had a macro for the beginning of a post on obesity. Some way to say obesity is bad, obesity is prevalent, and nothing seems...
The 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case is fast becoming as explosive as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) or Roe v. Wade (1973). It took nearly 60 years before...
Mitt Romney enters today...in excellent shape. To be sure, he's already lost out on the goal of sweeping to an easy nomination in January and he's been forced to fight...
Should returning soldiers from the war in Iraq get a ticker-tape parade in New York City? Some people apparently think this is appropriate. According to an article by Kate Taylor...
Not as often as you’d hope. There’s a new study in Health Affairs on the subject: The Charter on Medical Professionalism, endorsed by more than 100 professional groups worldwide and...
Stephen Budiansky, via Cosma Shalizi’s Pinboard feed. Back in ancient times when I worked at esteemed weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report, I always loathed the annual college rankings...
The 2012 election is looking better for President Barack Obama. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, he opened a six-point lead against Mitt Romney -- a finding confirmed in...
Kevin Drum notes that 65% of people in a WaPo poll approve of drone attacks on “suspected terrorists”, even on American citizens. The question mixes up some important issues, and...
Via Doctors for America [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]...
Some of the wingier wingnuts have convinced themselves – or hope to convince the marks – that the Obama campaign, the liberal commentariat, and the mainstream media all think that...
As a follow-up to my last post, and the comments thread thereon, I thought it would be useful to provide a kind of summary of the various arguments that otherwise-leftwing-academics...
I appreciate Michael Beckley’s response to a piece I wrote recently about China. I think Beckley's International Security article offers a useful corrective to an alarmist declinist perspective and has...
It is not shaping up to be a great week for either Vladimir Putin or Mitt Romney. Putin had to deal with the spectrum of yet another mass protest against...
I want to agree with Jonathan Chait, who argues there's nothing at all hypocritical about playing by the current campaign finance rules even as one attempts to change those rules in the...
Reader Michael Moschella writes in with the following interesting observation in light of last night’s bad night for Mitt Romney: El Paso County is home to Colorado Springs and a...
Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson,...
The twitters are all worked up this morning about the announcement that Bob Kerrey will not, after all, be returning to Nebraska to run for the open Senate seat there....
This morning’s New York Times contains an essential, shocking article by Michael Winerip on the level of writing needed to earn a passing grade on New York State’s high school...
A couple of people on Twitter picked up on my vaccine post from last week, leading to the usual emails questioning vaccine use. A larger than usual number of them...
You have to believe this was staged. Update Or Photoshopped. [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]...
I'm going to lead with the caveat. It's always really hard to extrapolate from campaigning to governing. The skills are overlapping but not identical, for one thing; for another, any...
In the GOP, there is, or was, a horse-race for the Presidential nomination: strike that as unfair to horses, and the race has been won by the Vulcan ahead of...
I am delighted to welcome Michael Beckley’s response to a piece I wrote recently about China and the United States. I may write a brief response later this week. *************************...
The chorus of commentators who argue that Libya set a precedent that doomed UN Security Council action on Syria appears to be growing. Here is Steve Walt in Foreign Policy,...
Ross Douthat: In the most recent Gallup poll on abortion, as many Americans described themselves as pro-life as called themselves pro-choice. A combined 58 percent of Americans stated that abortion...
Last weekend Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that sought to address the violence in Syria. The vote was 13-2. The resolution did not authorize the use...
Doug Mataconis analyzes how paranoid Tea Party movement members are now battling efforts to build bike lanes and put smart meters on appliances. Why? Because such policies are part of...
Methamphetamine cooks cannot operate their labs without easy access to the cold medicines that contain pseudoephedrine (PSE). This has resulted in a long-running political battle across the U.S. Many state...
If I were stranded on a desert island and allowed access to only a single source of U.S. political analysis, I’d request Nate Silver’s Five-Thirty-Eight blog at NYTimes.com. Timely and...
Really. I’m quite surprised to see that people are going so soft on the Mittster, saying that Romney inadvertently stated what he really believes. Mitt, like all Republicans nowadays, cares...
Likely not, according to Nils Petter Gledditsch, in the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Peace Research on this topic. Research to date shows little evidence for...
I pointed out in one of my “It’s been a great century” posts that not all of the reduction in cardiovascular disease specific mortality is due to medical interventions. My...
As everybody knows by now, Warren Buffett -- class traitor -- pays a smaller share of his income in taxes than does his secretary, Debbie Bosanek. In his State of...
Via a reader, this story about a grad student organization effort in Michigan, and a possible retaliation against a student, Jennifer Dibbern, who has lost her position as a researcher...
Newt Gingrich was so bitter after his Florida loss that he neither called Mitt Romney to concede nor congratulated him in his primary-night speech. Now he’s hell- bent on chasing...
Following this morning’s excellent jobs numbers, conservative Philip Klein tweeted: With economics improving, good thing GOP will nominate a candidate who can run a credible campaign against unpopular Obamacare. Oh,...
The most overrated element in Mitt Romney's big Florida win? Has to be his new debate coach. Sure, you can make an interesting story of the fact that Romney had...
Whenever my friends and family get riled up about the deficit (and many of them do), they like to rail against things they see in the news. Welfare being spent...
p>Having trained and practiced in various areas across the country, I’ve seen wide variation in the ways parents choose to care for their children. For instance, when I was in...
A grim surprise was tucked inside the Congressional Budget Office’s latest budget outlook. Economic growth, it said, would be only 2 percent in 2012, falling to 1.1 percent in 2013....
Is the Buffett Rule -- that rich folks should pay at least as much in taxes as the middle class -- a good idea? I'm sure there are reasonable arguments...
Four candidates left on the Republican side, and only one actual Protestant. I suppose that represents progress, of a sort. Paul, whatever his theology, is certainly a WASP. But the...
The GOP... has not always been a bastion of reflexive hostility to elites or to government. Quite the contrary. It was none other than George Romney—governor of Michigan, father of...
I do not myself watch television, but I respect the choice of those who do. There are many good things on TV; I just find other things in life interest...
My sometime coauthor Aaron Edlin cowrote (with Ian Ayres) an op-ed recommending a clever approach to taxing the rich.In their article they employ a charming bit of economics jargon, using...
Will Newt fight on to the convention? Will he continue attacking Romney, or will he back off? What are the incentives at play here? As Ed Kilgore notes, party leaders...