Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

I know there’s some deep meaning lurking in here somewhere, if only we could find it:

Marіo is often huge valuаblе builder оf work intо the last mоdels. Although not onlу hаve hе actually resеrved the prinсess cοuntlеss of this time pегiod when Jеssіca ѕomеwhat overseеs tο becοme kidnappeԁ. Βut he alѕo a friend who was іncorporаted in thе haгmless сommunity and also аs barely at any tіmе trеaѕuгed. Ok theу have an animаl, but no аnyone realizеѕ or rеmembers Luigi, аround dislike ӏ definіtely. Ι commemoratе him а young boy beаring his bit earth-frіendly costumes, frequently donning greenish.

Mario and Luigi?

The WASP-less election

The New Neo Posted on by

I hadn’t thought of this before, but it’s an interesting point that Peter Shrag makes:

For the first time in the 236-year history of the Republic, no one on either presidential ticket belongs to the once-prototypical American group, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Until 2008, when black Protestant Barack Obama ran with Catholic Joe Biden, we’d never had even one party offer a non-WASP ticket.

But that’s not all:

Looking past the presidential contenders, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, is Catholic, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader is Mormon. There’s not a WASP to be found among the nine justices of the Supreme Court (one black, five Catholic, three Jewish). That’s a clean sweep of all three branches of government.

Shrag goes on to add a lot of horse manure about how the voter ID laws are a backlash to all this, and an example of xenophobia. He conveniently ignores the fact that the same people who champion that movement are supporters of Catholic Paul Ryan, and black men such as Herman Cain and Allen West, as well as Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal and many others of varied ethnicities.

And funny thing, Obama seems to be the most WASP-like of the foursome, since that’s the predominant ethnic group on his mother’s side.

By the way, I can’t say I care much about the issue. I think of it more as a historical curiosity.

Is the left terrified…

The New Neo Posted on by

…of Paul Ryan?

I think they’re at least perturbed by him, not only because he’s smart and articulate, but because he’s got an incredibly likeable demeanor. That goes against the narrative about Republicans. It’s hard to pin the “callous, cold” label on him and make it stick.

He’s also young, which is attractive as well.

The linked article by Jeffrey Lord took me back to a time—the Reagan era—when I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to politics, although I never ignored it entirely. But I was a young mother with a young baby to tend to, and I didn’t choose to spend the almost nonexistent amount of free time I had reading about what was going on in DC.

So I missed little nuggets such as this statement by Democrat Tip O’Neill, House Speaker, referring to Reagan:

The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And note the “likes to ride a horse” bit. Shades of the liberal critique of Ann Romney. Who knew that demonizing the horsey set had such a lengthy and distinguished political pedigree?

What an elitist!:

The White House announces…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that we will have Joe Biden to kick around some more.

I don’t think that was ever in doubt. In this particular case, I think Obama is telling the truth when he says he has no intention of getting rid of Biden as WP. As I wrote yesterday:

Biden is exactly and precisely what Obama wants as his VP””someone who won’t challenge him or show him up in any way, and who has proven his loyalty time and again.

I will add that in general, Obama is not big on swapping horses, in mid-stream or otherwise. His appointees and aides don’t have to be competent in the way we ordinarily think of competence, they merely have to perform the tasks Obama has in mind.

Think back to how many people Obama has let go in his administration and/or his campaign so far. I can think of only two major figures who have left: Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. That’s a very small list with three things in common: they were never Obama loyalists in the first place, they disagreed with him on certain important matters, and they resigned (whether at his behest or not is unclear).

Ezra Klein says Paul Ryan is Obama’s golem, or something like that

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever since Romney picked Paul Ryan as his VP, there’s been an awful lot of even-stranger-than-usual stuff coming from the mouths/pens/computers of Democrats.

One of the oddest is a column by Maureen Dowd, which basically says that Ryan shouldn’t look so nice and smiley and handsome because he’s actually a mean sonofabitch.

I kid you not:

[Ryan]’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean-cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.

Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?

But twisted as that is, it pales in comparison to Ezra Klein’s latest effort, which is less colorful but decidedly more convoluted. In Klein’s fevered imagination, Obama not only wanted Ryan to become the de facto leader of the Republican Party because Obama thought his views would be easy to run against (which Obama may indeed have believed), but the president has actively worked for several years to build Ryan up and then tear him down with this very aim in mind.

Therefore, according to Klein, Ryan is Obama’s creation (the title of his piece is “How Obama Created the Greatest Threat to His Presidency”):

Here’s the weird thing about Paul Ryan being named to the Republican presidential ticket: It’s all part of Barack Obama’s campaign plan — a plan that’s working better than his strategists could have hoped.

You need to read the whole thing to get the flavor of it. The summary version is that Obama knew that Ryan’s detailed plan would not appeal to the American people, and that initially even Republicans agreed with him on that, so way back in January of 2010 Obama started praising Ryan and building him up for a while. Then he slammed Ryan and his plan hard, forcing the Republicans to rally around both. And now all of Obama’s careful efforts have borne fruit in this nomination.

The problem, of course, is that Klein realizes that Romney-Ryan may actually win, a disastrous result by Klein’s lights—made even worse by the fact that, according to Klein, without Obama’s machinations leading to Romney’s picking Ryan (stay with me, folks), Romney probably would have governed as a centrist but now will be severely conservative.

Obama’s playing four-dimensional chess, for sure. I’m not certain what Klein’s playing.

[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know what the word “golem” means, see this; also this section, which has special relevance for Klein’s piece.]

“Where’s it written…

The New Neo Posted on by

…we cannot lead the world in the 20th century in making automobiles?” asks Joe Biden.

Nowhere, Joe, nowhere—because history tells us that we did do just that.

Only problem is, it’s the 21st century now.

I actually have some sympathy with Biden on this one. As an oldish person myself, I sometimes forget we’re not still in the only century I used to know, the 20th.

On a related issue: will Obama dump Biden? My answer is: absolutely not. Biden is exactly and precisely what Obama wants as his VP—someone who won’t challenge him or show him up in any way, and who has proven his loyalty time and again.

Did Romney write the Chillicothe speech himself?

The New Neo Posted on by

I have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and I take everything campaign aides say with a grain of salt. But if true, it’s exceedingly interesting [emphasis mine]:

The Republican presidential candidate lit into his White House rival at a rally in Chillicothe, Ohio. Though some of the candidate’s speeches are written by staff, aides told Fox News that Romney personally wrote this one over the course of two days.

I highlighted “personally wrote this one” because it’s so unusual for candidates to do this, and because this speech was widely hailed by conservatives in particular. But I might also have highlighted “over the course of two days.” As a writer, I find that very impressive, too, especially in light of a candidate’s grueling schedule.

Fritz Haber and the uses of science

The New Neo Posted on by

I had never heard of chemist Fritz Haber until a couple of days ago, when I watched a TV dramatization of his story that was so melodramatic that I thought it was surely an exaggeration.

But surprisingly, when I looked Haber up, I found that his real story was even more dramatic, if possible, and more fraught with moral questions about the use of science.

Haber received a Nobel Prize in 1918 for his work in “fixing” nitrogen—a substance that previously had to be extracted from natural sources such as guano—from the air for use in fertilizer. His discovery paved the way for modern agriculture and its ability to feed many more people than previously possible (the slogan became “Bread out of air“).

But Haber was also a pioneer in chemical warfare—for Germany during WWI. A Jew who had converted to Christianity, he was a loyal and patriotic German, dedicated to the war effort.

Haber’s defense might have been that the French started it. He also said, “During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country” and asserted that killing was killing.

Haber’s wife (who was also trained as a chemist) committed suicide, perhaps in protest of his chemical warfare work, perhaps not. Their son did the same in 1946.

Haber discovered the limits of his devotion to Germany during the Hitler years. There were some things he would not do:

In 1933 he was ordered to fire all Jews in his Institute. He was told he could stay, despite being Jewish. He refused the order and instead left Germany, only to die of heart failure within a year.

Ironically, another of Haber’s inventions, Zyklon A, which he had developed as an insecticide, was modified to Zyklon B after his death and used in the gas chambers of Hitler’s death camps.

Anyone…

The New Neo Posted on by

…still think Romney’s not a fighter?

I don’t often say “I told you so,” but I can’t resist this time (see the last paragraph of this post, as well as paragraphs 4-6 here).

I don’t know whether Romney will win, and I guarantee he’ll do some things during the campaign that you won’t like (and probably as president, too, if we’re fortunate enough to see him defeat Obama). But I think he has pretty much put to rest the idea that he’s afraid to get tough with Obama.

And one of Romney’s strengths, I think, is his ability to say hard-hitting things while seeming calm and affable rather than petty and mean-spirited. Whatever’s going on inside him, that’s what he projects. Some people will see it as two-faced and phony. Others (and I am among them) will see it as presidential.

See also this and this.

The Onion channels Ryan talking to Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Ace.]

This is pretty funny, despite the obligatory Palin/Quayle-bashing, the kneejerk assumption that Ryan’s politics don’t really make sense, and the reference (not excerpted here) to Ryan’s being very white:

It’s okay to admit it. You’re frightened to death of me. It might actually be healthy for you to face your fears now rather than later, when Mitt and I are leading by a few points in the polls and it looks like this thing might end badly for you. Face it: I’m not some catastrophe waiting to happen, like a Sarah Palin or a Dan Quayle. On the contrary, you have the exact opposite fear. I’m a solid, competent, some might say exceptional, politician.

Did you get nervous when you read that last sentence? Is it because you know in your heart of hearts that it’s 100 percent true? Is it because, even if you strongly disagree with my beliefs on Medicare, Social Security, women’s rights, and marriage equality, you know my talent as a speaker and my well-thought-out approach to these issues””no matter how radical and convoluted you find them””might just be enough to win over independent voters?

Do you get chills just thinking about how strong my appeal actually is?

I have another question for you: How scared are you that I can convince people I’m right? Because I’m good at it. No, I’m really good at it. You see, I know how to turn up the charm and charisma without putting people off. Then I back up what I’m saying with arguments that, when they come out of my mouth, sound completely accurate and well-reasoned. And I do it with such passion that people automatically recognize me as a man with deep convictions he will stand up for, no matter what.

The American people love that shit. They love it.

I think that, if truth be known, this is much closer to what the Obama team really thinks of Paul Ryan than the opinions they trot out for public consumption. Boy, I’d like to be a fly on the wall…

[ADDENDUM: Politico certainly doesn’t agree. Not only does it not say that Democrats are afraid of Ryan’s candidacy, but it claims it’s really Republicans who are secretly terrified of him:

Away from the cameras, and with all the usual assurances that people aren’t being quoted by name, there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington: Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right ”” and a huge chance of going horribly wrong.

In more than three dozen interviews with Republican strategists and campaign operatives ”” old hands and rising next-generation conservatives alike ”” the most common reactions to Ryan ranged from gnawing apprehension to hair-on-fire anger that Romney has practically ceded the election.

Isn’t that astounding? In public, they’re all smiles. But privately, these unnamed and totally-off-the-record old Republican “operatives” (love that word) are confiding their secret terror to the folks at Politico. It would be instructive, to say the least, to learn who these frightened GOP operatives might be. David Brooks? Chris Buckley? Romney’s staff? McCain’s former aides? We’ll never know, because Politico isn’t saying.]

Michael Phelps and pool hygiene

The New Neo Posted on by

Olympian Michael Phelps pees in the pool.

And he says everybody does it, too.

But the survey from the WSJ article indicates that everybody doesn’t—or at least, they don’t own up to it, because 37.7% of respondents say they never do.

Of course, we don’t have the Democrat/Republican split. And is it all adults, or just likely voters?

Previous surveys (I know, I know; this is bordering on too much information) indicate that pool pee-ers (pool peeers?) only number about one in six of respondents (17%), although 78% believe (correctly, I suppose) that other people do it. As for the science of it all, there’s this:

Urine””as well as sweat and even sunscreen””contain nitrogen, which eats up a pool’s free chlorine. Free chlorine is what kills waterborne germs that could make you sick if ingested. So if too many people are peeing in the pool or diving in while sweaty, that could mean less chlorine’s available to wipe out nasty critters.

Worrying about this is not my top priority. Plus, I don’t hang out in public pools very often any more.

But I will close by noting that there’s a potent motivation for peeing in the pool: it’s cold to get out, and taking off that wet bathing suit and trying to shoehorn yourself back into it is remarkably arduous.

Eliminating Medicare as we know it

The New Neo Posted on by

Get ready to hear a lot of this sort of thing: “Paul Ryan’s plan would ELIMINATE MEDICARE as we know it.”

The words “eliminate Medicare” will be said with great emphasis, and the phrase “as we know it” will be much softer in volume and spoken a lot quicker. The idea is to have the listener focus in fear on the first phrase, with the second as an almost meaningless afterthought.

What will be left out? Oh, just about everything: the fact that Medicare “as we know it” is already unsustainable, the fact that Medicare “as we know it” would also be “eliminated” by Obamacare, and of course the actual facts of Ryan’s actual plan, which go like this:

But Ryan’s new plan, released this year, is more generous in terms of what it would provide for subsidies, and it keeps traditional Medicare as an option for all beneficiaries, both current and future.

Here’s a quick rundown of the latest Ryan plan:

For seniors who are now in Medicare, nothing changes. They can stay with the traditional program as it is.

Beginning in 2023, 65-year-olds would have their choice of insurance plans ”” private and traditional ”” on a new Medicare exchange. A premium-support payment, like a subsidy, would be sent to the plan of their choice.

If the chosen plan costs more than the premium-support, the senior would pay the difference.

The Medicare eligibility age would be slowly raised to 67 by 2034.

All plans on the Medicare exchange would offer a base level of benefits, and they would be regulated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The premium-support payments would be tied to the second-cheapest plan, which can’t grow more than gross domestic product plus 0.5 percentage points. If the cost does grow faster, Congress would be required to step in and take some action to keep costs down.

CBO didn’t conduct an analysis that shows what seniors might have to spend out of pocket under the latest plan. But it said that “beneficiaries might face higher costs,” adding that there was uncertainty in making such predictions. CBO said that both the Ryan plan and current law could lead to the same consequences ”” “reduced access to health care; diminished quality of care; increased efficiency of health care delivery; less investment in new, high-cost technologies; or some combination of those outcomes. In addition, beneficiaries might face higher costs, which could in turn reinforce some of the other effects.” And some of the effects would be greater under the Ryan plan because government spending is lower. But there was no estimate of seniors paying $6,000 more, or any other amount, under the latest GOP plan.

Hey, but if you’re the Obama campaign, why let a few facts get in the way of good propaganda?

More here about Ryan and Medicare.

And here’s a joint interview with Romney and Ryan: