Eerie Prescience, Esquire Division: A lot of what is written about the new smarts-and-skills based elite, and how it is separating off from society–by, among others, Robert Reich, me, David Brooks and now Charles Murray–was anticipated in a ballsy, now-forgotten 1978 Esquire article that turned into this book. …
KausFiles
February 22, 2012
5:11 pm
2:08 am
Big Swinging Swingers: You say Latinos are key swing voters in swing states? How about lower-income whites? Fivethirtyeight.com‘s Nate Silver notes that “low income whites are concentrated in swing states ….” If a presidential candidate loses these voters by, say, Hispandering on immigration, he loses, no? Maybe Mitt Romney’s strategists have seen the same numbers. …
P.S.: I’m not saying that a candidate should choose immigration policy on the basis of what More »
February 17, 2012
4:09 am
From Media Central–All Member Action Alert: We need to give Gingrich another boost–immediately. He’s dragging along at under 15% in national polls. If we want a brokered GOP convention–and we do–we can’t let this thing become a two-way race between Romney and Santorum. A two way race means it’s highly likely that one of the two will get 51% of the delegates, as Sean Trende points out. The plan clearly calls for three (3) semi-strong candidates More »
February 15, 2012
4:49 am
The Cocoon’s Jejune Swoon! New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal says there’s a “lesson in negotiation” for Dems in the Republican surrender on payroll tax cuts:
If the Congressional Democrats and the White House stand firm on a principle, and keep up the heat, it may be possible to get the Republicans to back down. I can’t resist pointing out that they should have learned this lesson a lot More »
February 13, 2012
4:51 am
Report from the field: When journalists want to understand the historical meaning of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal–focus of an upcoming PBS documentary–they turn to CNN adultery expert Jeffrey Toobin! …
P.S.: Yes, I have it in for Toobin, because of his awful, sleazy–and, in retrospect, conveniently cheater-friendly–Clinton book, A Vast Conspiracy …
4:23 am
Two points about Paul Krugman’s review of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart:
1) Krugman blames the rise in ”social dysfunction” of the traditional working class not on liberal cultural values but on the decline in economic opportunities for “lower-education working men.” Makes sense to me. But I wish Krugman wouldn’t keep calling this phenomenon “inequality”– a term that conveniently ropes in an Occupyish disgust with rising incomes at the top. It’s really a problem of the bottom, not the top, no? More »
February 10, 2012
5:49 am
End of the Fight Club?** Now JournoList eminence Matthew Yglesias tells us he has “come to think that ‘mean’ arguments are counterproductive.” … Hard-to-resist working thesis: This is what happens when you end a private institution where ambitious young leftish political writers preen for each other (and Scoutmaster DeLong) by showing how vitriolic and thuggish they can be about their ideological opponents. … Jonathan Chait had to be especially mean on domestic More »
4:21 am
Give us more phony stories please! “President Obama is on Spotify, and he put together a playlist,” reports Entertainment Weekly. Both halves of this statement appear to be false. The Spotify site itself says
The official 2012 playlist features picks by the campaign staff—including a few of President Obama’s favorites.
In other words, it’s pure BS. Self-aware BS, maybe, but BS. … The Larger Issue: The essential phoniness of the Obama/Spotify story might have been a More »
4:15 am
Note to my CPAC friends: Why do conservatives want “local control” of education again? Don’t the teachers’ unions typically have more power at the state and local level? In California, where I live, the teachers’ unions more or less run the place, in part because in local races they they bring to bear the kind of muscle that can make or break a rising Democratic pol. At the federal level, this power is diluted–the unions are one big More »
February 8, 2012
3:58 am
The Reinhardt Ratchet: I recommend the Volokh Conspiracy bloggers for instant unpacking of Judge Stephen Reinhardt’s decision striking down California Prop. 8′s ban on same-sex marriages. Two initial thoughts: 1) Any decision based on the “rational relationship” test is almost certainly a crock. As a famous Yale Law Journal note by Robert F. Nagel argued decades ago, every statute is perfectly rationally related to … doing exactly what it does! When judges find that a More »
