Not quite right but…

Today’s run: very slow 8 miles (1:27:36); it was rainy and the course was a bit slippery. But mostly I couldn’t get into it. I felt heavy, weak and lifeless; I didn’t mind the run; I actually enjoyed it…but I had no “pop” in my stride at all.

I stretched afterward.

Posts
I love what Paul Krugman says about this post: if you think that you are being made fun of, then you are. The economics crackpots just get blistered here.

More economics: our recession sucked but could have sucked worse. The numbers don’t lie even if the Republicans do.

Political Race
Obviously, though I like what Intrade says, this race isn’t over. But if Mr. Romney loses, the fault is probably more of what the current Republicans actually are than their candidate, as Robert Reich argues.

My take: the Republicans compose three large groups: the “leave me alone” group (Idaho, Wyoming, etc.), the “rabid populist/return to Jesus” group (southern states) and the big money group (millionaires pay too much tax group) and so they will always be able to win Senate races in sparsely populated states and win House districts. So, they’ll always have enough influence to possibly control the House, or at worst, gum up the works in the Senate.

Yes, Mr. Romney might still win but:

World Events
Fareed Zakaria (yes, his plagiarism charge has been investigated and shown to be sloppiness rather than intentional)
He still has interesting things to say. He points out that the US doesn’t always have as much influence on the rest of the world (especially reactions in the Muslim part of the Middle East) as we sometimes think.

Ryan-Romney: The Tea Party Dream of REAL AMERICA

This is the Ryan-Romney campaign staff photo.

Good lord…if I went to one of their rallies they’d probably call INS on me.

Well, one more day….

Yoga (crowded class; saw Lynn and T was wearing her usual tight spandex…)

Then 32 minute warm up jog (3 miles), 9 goose loop laps (29:45; 9:37/10:13/9:55) .5 on, .22 off, then one hard .36, then 2 miles of jogging.
The day was pretty, I felt fine but I didn’t have that extra “umpf”; 13 seconds slower than last week.

Note: the weather has cooled off a bit. But my previous strategy of doing my slow running outside (in the heat) and my faster (ok, less glacial) running inside (treadmill/indoor track) wasn’t all crazy.

Academia:
Class starts tomorrow; department meeting today.

Posts

What is more likely: Bronze Age people living in a planet in a galaxy that is like millions of other galaxies got it right (when they got almost nothing else right) or they were just making stuff up?

However, there are millions who think that the Bronze Age people got it right….one of them is Hike Huckabee:

Why is everybody so down on rape? This is what Mike Huckabee wanted to know today, on his radio program, which also featured Rep. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin as a guest. For instance, did you know that Ethel Waters was conceived when her mother got raped? Do you know what a world without rape would look like? A world without Ethel Waters, that’s what.

This is what Mike Huckabee said today, as transcribed by the Los Angeles Times’ James Rainey, about the upside of being raped and then getting pregnant:

“Ethel Waters, for example, was the result of a forcible rape,” Huckabee said of the late American gospel singer. One-time presidential candidate Huckabee added: “I used to work for James Robison back in the 1970s, he leads a large Christian organization. He, himself, was the result of a forcible rape. And so I know it happens, and yet even from those horrible, horrible tragedies of rape, which are inexcusable and indefensible, life has come and sometimes, you know, those people are able to do extraordinary things.”

Anyway, stop being so racist against rape-babies, everyone.

Yep….Hiroshima and Tokyo were nicely rebuilt after being a-bombed and firebombed respectively. This clown is just completely tone deaf.

I wonder if this represents a split in the Republican Party between the religious clowns that the “money first” types. Yes, I got a private message from one of the religious types saying that I am misreading things. I don’t think that I am; I really don’t think that religious conservatism has a long term future in the industrialized world. My guess is that in 1-2 more generations, religion will be as dead here as it is in Western Europe. We’ll still have conservatives but they won’t be religious ones.

Note: I disagree with this article slightly. Yes, more Republicans are creationists, but many Democrats embrace woo and new-age nonsense. The difference, as I see it, is scope. We might have someone like Senator Tom Harkin trying to get “alternative medicine” (aka “quackery”) into the health care bills. But that doesn’t compare, in scope, to the scores of creationists in Congress, state legislatures and school boards who are trying to ruin science and science education.

Note: ironically, I don’t see religion as being a left/right thing. Many in the Democratic coalition are religious (example: African Americans). This has an interesting effect on President Obama’s reelection strategy and it is NOT the obvious one.

My Thoughts: Illinois Primary Election

My take: if Rick Santorum can get his people to the polls (church goers, households making 100K or less per year, downstate voters), he might beat his poll numbers again and win Illinois. In any event, he should clean up on delegates downstate.

The local downticket elections are boring, at least on the Democratic side, though the Illinois Supreme Court (Cook County) has an interesting race and some Illinois Congressional primary races might be competitive.

There is an IL-17 race, but Cheri Bustos has the backing of the party heavyweights and should win easily.

End of the day ramblings: Romney, Charlatans, Santorum and Bacteria

Workout notes
Yesterday I ran 6 miles; 4 with Matt and then I had to retreat a bit; I finished 6 miles on the Rock Island Trail in 57:50. The last two miles were roughly in the 10 mpm range. That got me out of breath.

Today: weights and 2200 swimming; the swim was 500 of fist/free, 500 of back/free, 500 of drill/free (3g, then 5g), 5 x 100 (25 fly, 75 free) on the 2:10 (mostly 1:54-55, with last in 1:50), 200 in 3:36.

Weights: C1: pulley rotator cuff, Hammer Rows (12 x 180, 10 x 230, 7 x 250), curls (3 sets of 10 x 30 lb. dumbbell), pull downs (3 sets of 10 x 160)
C2: sit ups and bench: 10 x 135, 9 x 165, 4 x 175, 4 x 175
C3: sit ups and incline: 2 sets of 8 x 135
C4: sit ups, (get to 8 x 20), dumbbell rotator cuff, 4 x 10 pull ups
C5: dumbbell rotator cuff, 2 x 15 x 45 lb. military dumbbell, 10 x 35 exercise ball dumbbell military.

Trail notes from yesterday: a woman clad in shiny spandex tights (spray painted on) bent over to clean up after her dog; it looked like two black shiny sand dunes staring at me. Pity I didn’t have a camera.

Posts
Republicans: not especially enthusiastic about Mitt Romney.

Ann Coulter: refers to people like Sarah Palin as “charlatans”. Pot, meet Kettle.

Illinois: Santorum vs. Romney. Nate Silver has an excellent article about how Illinois is divided politically and socially. It is basically Chicago vs. “everything else”; the “everything else” may as well be a southern state….sort of. Overall, it isn’t as religious as the deep south.

Republicans: lying their asses off about the new CBO report; it is the old “apples to oranges” comparison.

Science Antibiotic bacteria are evolving rapidly; we may well have to re-fight all of the old anti-infection wars. That is: medicine may well be going backwards. There are many reasons for this.

Talk about being ENTITLED….

Unbelievable

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Ken Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire who is one of the 400 richest people in America, argued that the ultrawealthy in this country don’t have enough influence over politics. Griffin went on to say that the ultrawealthy “have a duty” to step forward and save the U.S. from what he says is a drift toward Soviet-style state control of the economy:

Q. I’m going to come back to this. But I want to touch on two more areas first. What do you think in general about the influence of people with your means on the political process? You said shame on the politicians for listening to the CEOs. Do you think the ultrawealthy have an inordinate or inappropriate amount of influence on the political process?

A. I think they actually have an insufficient influence. Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet. And so I hope that other individuals who have really enjoyed growing up in a country that believes in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and economic freedom is part of the pursuit of happiness – (I hope they realize) they have a duty now to step up and protect that. Not for themselves, but for their kids and for their grandchildren and for the person down the street that they don’t even know …

At this moment in time, these values are under attack. This belief that a larger government is what creates prosperity, that a larger government is what creates good (is wrong). We’ve seen that experiment. The Soviet Union collapsed. China has run away from its state-controlled system over the last 20 years and has pulled more people up from poverty by doing so than we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity. Why the U.S. is drifting toward a direction that has been the failed of experiment of the last century, I don’t understand. I don’t understand.

Emphasis mine. This clown thinks that the rich don’t have ENOUGH influence.

Remember that this guy didn’t get rich finding a cure for cancer; he is a hedge fund manager.
I’d say “unbelievable” but given how entitled many of my former Naval Academy classmates feel…it is all too believable.

Republicans and Latino voters..

Via NPR:

There’s a man in Phoenix with a political playbook that has become valuable. So valuable, the Obama campaign believes it could help clinch the president’s re-election.

Phoenix City Council Member Daniel Valenzuela is a fourth-generation Mexican-American. Last year, he won a seat on the Phoenix City Council in a traditionally Republican district, and he did it by increasing Latino voter turnout by 488 percent.

“I decided early on that this campaign would be a campaign for social behavioral change,” Valenzuela tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “To get people active, register to vote, realize the power of a vote and to get them to cast that vote.”

Latino voters continue to shape American politics, and this election season should see candidates on both sides courting the support of the fast-growing group. In Valenzuela’s case, he did it the old-fashioned way. He recruited a group of local university students who knocked on 72,000 doors.[...]

This past week, Fox News published a poll showing Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich winning just 14 percent of the Latino vote in an individual race against President Obama.

More than half of U.S. population growth today is being fueled by the Latino community. The reason this is so important to presidential politics is because of where that population growth is happening. In addition to Arizona, states that have often voted Republican like Florida, Virginia and Colorado, have all seen growth in their Latino populations. But demographer Ruy Teixeira with the Center for American Progress says that could soon swing the other way.

“If President Obama polls 75 percent of the minority vote, he can lose white voters by huge margins and still win the election, including white working class voters,” Teixeira says.

Teixeira says that if Obama can get the margin that he got in 2008 from Latino voters, he would get that 75 percent of the minority vote. While that that doesn’t exactly make Obama bulletproof, Teixeris says, it certainly gets him a long way toward being re-elected.

The long, competitive Republican primary is part of the reason more Latinos are turning away from the GOP, Teixeira says. He says Latino voters have taken notice of what’s been said at the GOP debates on issues important to them.

“They’re all against the Dream Act; they’re all against in-state tuition … believe me, people notice and especially Latino voters notice,” he says. “It just reinforces this image of the Republican Party as being unwelcoming to immigrants.”

The article goes on to say that President Bush got 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004.

But this was prior to the way that many of the Republicans have openly disrespected President Obama and called into question if he was a “Real American”.

I can’t speak for anyone else and I haven’t taken a poll. But I can say that every time I hear this BS about President Obama not being a “real American” I question whether the Republicans consider anyone who doesn’t look like them (mostly white) to be a “real American”. I wonder if their idea of “real America” is Mayberry.

When the Republicans accuse President Obama of apologizing for America, I wonder if they really want to get along with the rest of the world.

Anyway, I haven’t seen any sign that they want Latino votes. Perhaps other Latinos see it differently.

Shame, Oil Prices and Romney’s “multiple choice” on “choice”

No, this really isn’t snark when you think about it.
Of course I care what my friends, colleagues and students some students think of me and I care about what my wife and daughter think of me, and I care about what a tiny, tiny subset of the population thinks of me. But that’s about it.

Education
Accountability is a good thing, but it is NOT easy to achieve. From Bill Gates via the New York Times

I am a strong proponent of measuring teachers’ effectiveness, and my foundation works with many schools to help make sure that such evaluations improve the overall quality of teaching. But publicly ranking teachers by name will not help them get better at their jobs or improve student learning. On the contrary, it will make it a lot harder to implement teacher evaluation systems that work. [...]

Putting sophisticated personnel systems in place is going to take a serious commitment. Those who believe we can do it on the cheap — by doing things like making individual teachers’ performance reports public — are underestimating the level of resources needed to spur real improvement.

About those high gas prices
I find it a bit amusing that the Republicans are complaining about the gas prices…while doing a bunch of saber rattling about Iran. Of course, our current gas price spike is caused by a number of factors; the situation in Iran is one of them as is oil market speculation. This is a detailed summary.
What won’t reduce prices? The pipeline, for one. Yes, once it is up and running, it MIGHT reduce gas prices by a few pennies a gallon (ok, this would be important to some industries). But as far as what we are seeing at the pump? It is statistical noise, IN THE FUTURE, compared to other factors:

Ray Perryman, the economist hired by TransCanada to assess the economic benefits of the pipeline, told me that his analysis — the methodology of which has been questioned — points to an impact of “around 3.5-4 cents per gallon of gasoline at current prices” once the pipeline “was fully implemented and flowing reasonably close to capacity.” Moody’s economist Chris Lafakis estimates that when balancing out the different regional impacts, “the pipeline would lower US gas prices by 1.6 cents per gallon.”

For comparison, the U.S. average gasoline price has increased nearly 30 cents in the past two months. Perryman, a supporter of the pipeline, added: “I should also point out that a modest change of this nature will often be swamped by the day-to-day factors that impact market prices.”

Analysts say gas prices are currently rising due to expectations of global economic growth, concerns about Iranian threats to disrupt oil supply and an influx of speculators.

Upshot: if you think that the pipeline is a good idea, argue for it. But don’t make this “price at the pump” claim; that is bogus.

Willard “Mitt” Romney’s history on the abortion issue: yes, it is more nuanced that “he is a flip-flopper”.

However he isn’t helping himself when he attempts to tell his own story on this issue. Here is the start of the article, and it runs for seven pages. Upshot: it isn’t as simple as “flip-flop” or “I’ve changed my mind”.

To understand Mitt Romney, you have to understand the most difficult passage of his political life: how he changed his position on abortion. Not the story he tells about it, but the real story.

Romney began his political career as a pro-choicer. In the story he tells, he had an epiphany, a flash of insight, and committed himself thereafter to protecting life. But that isn’t what happened. The real story of Romney’s conversion—a series of tentative, equivocal, and confused shifts, accompanied by a constant rewriting of his past—paints a more accurate picture of who he is. Romney has complex views and a talent for framing them either way, depending on his audience. He values truth, so he makes sure there’s an element of it in everything he says. He can’t stand to break his promises, so he reinterprets them.

Parts of the story have been told before. But no one has put it together. And no one has assembled the many video and audio clips that bear witness to what happened. In this article, the first complete examination of Romney’s journey, you’ll see his transformation on camera. (You can also watch a video narration.)

When you see the story in its full context, three things become clear. First, this was no flip-flop. Romney is a man with many facets, groping his way through a series of fluid positions on an array of difficult issues. His journey isn’t complete. It never will be. Second, for Romney, abortion was never really a policy question. He didn’t want to change the law. What he wanted to change was his identity. And third, the malleability at Romney’s core is as much about his past as about his future. Again and again, he has struggled to make sense not just of what he should do, but of who he has been. The problem with Romney isn’t that he keeps changing his mind. The problem is that he keeps changing his story.

Nasty Newt in a Landslide…

South Carolina:

Columbia, South Carolina (CNN) — Newt Gingrich won Saturday’s South Carolina GOP presidential primary, marking a stunning turnaround for a candidate who finished fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire and whose campaign had been left for dead — again — by observers just weeks ago.

With about 95% of polling places reporting, Gingrich had 40% of the vote, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney getting 27% and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum getting 17%. U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas had 13%. Based on early returns and exit polls, CNN projected Gingrich the winner.

So, talking down to black people is a winning strategy among Republican primary voters. Mr. Romney: you are going to have to get meaner.

But from my point of view: I’d much rather President Obama ran against Newt Gingrich than Willard Romney.

Note: Intrade showed this just a few seconds ago:

That is down from over 90 percent!

On the other hand, Obama shares went up from 51 to 54 percent!

If I were on the Romney campaign, I’d shout that at the top of my lungs. Clearly the market sees Romney as a bigger threat to an Obama reelection than Gingrich.

More On Republicans: Romney and Gingrich

Willard Romney

Note: he is right about not removing the capital gains tax rate. But yes, he is rich and pays less in tax than the rest of us. Yes, they can do this legally and, as Robert Reich says, it is a scandal:

Romney says he pays a tax rate of “about 15 percent.”

That’s lower than the tax rate most of America’s middle class face and far lower than the 35 percent top rate after the Bush tax cut. (To put this in perspective, recall that the top income tax rate under Dwight Eisenhower was 91 percent.)

Newt Gingrich immediately pounced on Mitt’s admission as evidence that Newt’s proposed flat 15 percent tax is ideal, and wants to call it the “Romney tax.” Newt’s flat tax is a fraud. It would dramatically lower the taxes of most of the top 1 percenters and increase the taxes of most of the rest of us.

The real smoking gun is how Romney manages to pay only 15 percent on what’s been his money-gusher of compensation from Bain Capital. Romney hasn’t released his tax returns yet, but the most obvious answer is he treats his Bain income as capital gains — subject to the current capital gains rate of only 15 percent.

A loophole in the tax laws allows private-equity managers like Romney to treat their compensation as capital gains. It’s legal but it’s a scandal. Income from employment is employment income, period.

Private-equity managers cling to the technicality that the money they take out of their companies comes from the appreciation of assets they own and sell. That may be true, but it’s still income they get from their jobs. Common sense would dictate it be treated as ordinary income.

Congress has vowed for years to close this loophole. But somehow it persists. Even when Democrats have been in charge, they haven’t been able to close it.

Guess why. The managers and executives of private-equity funds are big donors to Republicans and Democrats alike.

And as far as the “not very much” he gets from speaking fees? Try 360K plus.

What he means, of course, that it isn’t “much” compared to his current wealth and capital gains.

The Newtron Bluster Bomb
I wasn’t alone in thinking that he blew racial dog whistles all over the place last night. Psst: most poor people are working poor.

He also attacked Mr. Romney, in part….for knowing another language? Listen all the way to the end:

As far as the foodstamps remark: much of it came because of the recession that he inherited. Also: many on foodstamps….also have a job. Politifact weighs in:

We’ll start by noting that “food stamps” — which provide qualifying, low-income Americans with vouchers to buy groceries — have officially been known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, since October 2008, although many people still use the informal name.

It’s possible to interpret Gingrich’s statement that “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history” as suggesting that Obama is forcing people into the program. In fact, it’s a voluntary program.

In any case, here are the historical data:

For the most recent month with available data — October 2011 — roughly 46.2 million people received SNAP benefits. That’s down slightly from September 2011, when 46.3 million people received benefits, but those two months were the highest in history. The trendline shows consistent increases in the numbers of Americans receiving SNAP benefits: 30.8 million in October 2008, 37.7 million in October 2009, and 43.2 million in October 2010.

In addition, the average number of people on SNAP every month hit a record high in 2011 — 44.7 million. It’s risen every year since 2007.

We also checked to make sure that this wasn’t influenced by population growth, and it wasn’t. Currently, about 14 percent of the population is on food stamps. In 1994, the highest year for SNAP use prior to the recession that began in December 2007, the rate was 10.5 percent.

So Gingrich is correct that food stamp use is at its highest level in both raw numbers and as a percentage of the U.S. population since the program began in 1969.

Case closed? Not quite. Gingrich’s talking point implies that this is Obama’s fault.

Clearly, the rise in food stamps is a direct consequence of the most recent recession, which began more than a year before Obama took office. It’s impossible to know how high SNAP usage would have gone had the Republicans, rather than Obama, shaped policy in 2009 and 2010.

On the one hand, SNAP usage has continued to climb almost every month of the Obama presidency despite some signs of an economic recovery. So Gingrich’s charge cannot simply be dismissed out of hand.

On the other hand, there is typically a lag time before an upturn in the broader economy begins to show up in decreased SNAP usage. The previous high from 1994, for instance, came following a recession that officially ended in mid 1991 — and that recession was much milder than the most recent one. This makes it harder to divvy up the blame.

One last point: The number of food stamp beneficiaries had started to head upward under President George W. Bush, partly because of more aggressive efforts to get eligible Americans to apply for benefits, and partly because of changes in the rules that had the effect of broadening eligibility. The experts we spoke to agreed that both policies began under Bush but were retained by Obama.

As far as Mr. Perry who cares about this idiot. He is toast.