Truly amazing.

By the way, this is a little too much for even Barney Frank to get behind. He says he doesn't like Gingrich (or "Gin-rich," as Matthews pedantically says, a la his insistence on "Cheeney"), and "disapproves" of him (Frank disapproves of someone?), but thinks evil is more like, you know, killing people and taking pleasure in their suffering.

Leftist softboys like Matthews will argue that the rightwing is imbecilic for believing in good and evil for hours.

Until the issue of a Republican politician is brought up. And then they are True Believers in black-and-white morality.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (241)
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From Laura. A couple of guys write shopping lists for each other. They then go to Target, and ask workers there if they have the items on the list.

The items are non-existent products, of the absurd variety.

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Posted by: Ace at 08:33 AM | Comments (104)
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Literally unbelievable, I think. ARG has a bad reputation in my mind for shoddy polling.

Suspicious to me is that Ron Paul, who you can generally count on to get 10% in most places, is only at 2%.

Bear in mind that "Doctor" Ron Paul's fans are so devoted that they buy cookbooks containing recipes from the Paul Family (and friends), like he's Suzanne Sommers or something.

Clarification: This is the third poll showing Gingrich with a comfortable lead in Florida.

I am not disputing he's the current front runner -- and by a pretty good margin. It's just this 50% business I'm specifically calling shenanigans on.

Another Clarification: Uh, I thought the other polls had Gingrich at 35% or so.

Nope. The other two have him at 41% and 47% in Florida.

So this 50% figure is not really unbelievable.

I just seem to have not updated my "general sense of things" fast enough to keep up with what seems to be a much stronger bandwagon/sudden embrace effect than we've seen before.

Posted by: Ace at 08:06 AM | Comments (379)
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Ominous.

Compare that headline with "Jobless Claims Climb Back Over 400,000."

Posted by: Ace at 07:46 AM | Comments (122)
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Sometimes there are things I don't think can be fairly pinned on Obama.

And then sometimes, someone suggests a way that thing can be fairly pinned on him.

ObamaÂ’s foolish policy of forcing Mubarak out of office precipitously without giving non-Islamist parties time to organize has resulted in Islamists achieving a sweeping victory in the first round of parliamentary elections. Strength by the Muslim Brotherhood was expected, but the extremely hard line Salafists had a very strong showing.

The blame-Obama line suggested by Legal Insurrection didn't occur to me. It does sound plausible. Mubarak wanted a year for an "orderly transition." It seems like such a thing would have been helpful.

From the NYT:

Islamists claimed a decisive victory on Wednesday as early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority in EgyptÂ’s first Parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the most significant step yet in the religious movementÂ’s rise since the start of the Arab Spring.

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, EgyptÂ’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject womenÂ’s participation in voting or public life.

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

So what did we win? Obama loved posing as the Herald of the Egyptian Street during this period; did his preening advance America's interests?

Thanks to Ben.

Posted by: Ace at 06:47 AM | Comments (271)
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This seems like an odd charge against someone who has been running for the White House job for six years now. Romney fans' big boast is that Mitt Romney is the "electable" candidate ready to take on the President and the Democratic media. But Romney can't even take utterly obvious questioning from Fox News' Bret Baier?

As bad as the original interview was, the RomneyÂ’s reaction simply confirms the perception that Romney will have trouble in a general election. If he canÂ’t handle totally legitimate questions from Baier, and his team will not let him appear before the Center Seat panel, then how will he hold up when the media and Team Obama gang up on him?

Romney hasn't just been avoiding the Center Seat. When you get down to it, he's also been avoiding the Sunday morning shows. Now, when Palin tried the strategy of shutting out the legacy media, the Palinistas said it was a brilliant idea to not give the evil, liberal media a chance to take shots at her. She was seizing control of the narrative, the idea goes. Most other folks thought it demonstrated that she wasn't ready for a run. (To be totally fair, we now know that she wasn't running and her decision not to engage the media makes more sense.)

Romney, on the other hand, is definitely running. He's going to have to face the media at some point, right? So what's his excuse?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:42 AM | Comments (195)
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An "extremely quiet" war against Iran in progress?

GOP getting ready to cave on new taxes? I'm sure you'll be as shocked as I was to find that it was Susan Collins of Maine who broke ranks first. It'll be interesting to see if her fellow Senator Olympia Snowe and Scott Brown down in Massachusetts follow the Democrat "soak the rich" playbook as well. They don't call the GOP the stupid party for nothing.

The big intervention of the central banks (you know, the one that sent markets into a euphoric rally yesterday) did nothing but buy a little time. All of the basic problems are still there, and the half-life of these interventions is getting shorter and shorter. (A lot of people think that this was less a bailout for the Eurozone than an recapitalization of banks in the wake of the mass downgrade by the credit rating agencies a few days ago.)

Peter Schiff, one of my favorite Austrian-school finance guys, explains what the central-bank action means, both in the short and medium term. (He's a fellow goldbug, so his advice boils down to "buy gold".)

The bond markets won't be fooled for long about the central bank intervention; the bond markets are less easily swayed by manufactured "good news" than equities markets.

The United States: a net fuel exporter for the first time in 62 years? Most people are surprised at how much oil, gas, and coal America produces domestically. We're not self-sufficient, but we produce a lot more than many people think we do. And we could produce a lot more if the thicket of reglatory red tape was cut back a bit.
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Posted by: Monty at 04:40 AM | Comments (100)
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Oh my. December.

In news that will probably come back to hurt us, the Muslim Brotherhood had a big election win in Egypt yesterday. I have a vague recollection that they said they wouldn't run candidates.

Now that Medicare will pay for obesity treatment, national "weight-loss experts" say they, and not actual doctors, should get their cut of the money since doctors don't really know anything about weight loss, or something.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:00 AM | Comments (182)
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