Napolitano says that most Republicans don't understand or accept that the 14th Amendment guarantees the Bill of Rights to citizens vis a vis their state government, too -- so if the federal government can't do it, the state government can't do it either.

Only one candidate -- the Only Man Who Can Save America -- believes this, as Napolitano does.

Here's the problem with that: The core 14th Amendment guarantee is that slavery, and all "badges of servitude", are hereby outlawed.

And yet only Ron Paul, of the candidates, disbelieves in this core guarantee -- he believes that it is an impingement of "freedom" to insist that Jim Crow and racial apartheid be stamped out.

And no, this isn't from the newsletters he supposedly didn't write. He continues insisting on this point.

Odd, isn't it, that Ron Paul, the champion of freedom, suddenly reverses himself on that point? more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Comments (552)
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Losing my religion.

The other point I would make about integrity is that it goes close to the core of why a Romney nomination worries me so much: because we would all have to make so many compromises to defend him that at the end of the day we may not even recognize ourselves. Romney has, in a career in public office of just four years (plus about 8 years' worth of campaigning), changed his position on just about every major issue you can think of, and his signature accomplishment in office was to be wrong on the largest policy issue of this campaign.

Yes, Obama is bad, and Romney can be defended on the grounds that he can't possibly be worse. Yes, Romney is personally a good man, a success in business, faith and family. But aside from his business biography, his primary campaign has been built entirely on arguments and strategies - about touting his own electability and dividing, coopting or delegitimizing other Republicans - none of which will be of any use in the general election. What, then, will we as politically active Republicans say about him?

...Mitt Romney's record is just one endless sheet of thin ice as far as the eye can see - there's no way to have any kind of confidence that we can tell people he stands for something today without being made fools of tomorrow. We who have laughed along with Jim Geraghty's prescient point that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date will be the ones laughed at, and worse yet we will know the critics are right. Every time I try to talk myself into thinking we can live with him, I run into this problem. It's one that particularly bedeviled Republicans during the Nixon years - many partisan Republicans loved Nixon because he made the right enemies and fought them without cease or mercy, but the man's actual policies compromised so many of our principles that the party was crippled in the process even before Watergate. We can stand for Romney, but we'll find soon enough that that's all we stand for.

Let me repeat yet again: So if the only real rationale for Romney is that he is, supposedly, electable -- which is a concern I think is important -- isn't it crucial to kick the tires of this so-called electablity and see if it's in the shape it's claimed to be?

I'll give you an example. I long considered Romney the most electable candidate myself. At least with moderates. The polls all said so, after all.

Now, I didn't favor him because I thought his candidacy would split the party and and I didn't like most of his actual political impulses, but I generally believed him to be more electable than anyone else.

I knew about his flip-flops, of course. I knew about them intellectually. I considered them intellectually. I weighed them intellectually, as regards an intellectual exercise, figuring out what he might do if actually in office.

Then I saw that highlight reel of his flip-flops from the DNC. And suddenly those flip-flops weren't just intellectual to me anymore. Now I looked at Romney and thought, "Ugh. This guy is literally willing to say anything, isn't he? How pathetic. How dishonest."

I always thought the flip-flops wouldn't be a concern in the general election because, hey, if he flip-flops from conservative to moderate and back again that should make him more attractive to moderates, right?

But not when you see them all and begin to doubt his character, which I had hitherto believed squeaky-clean and a strength of his.

Some of these are bs (supporting a stimulus is not the same thing as supporting Obama's failed stimulus; 95% of elected Republicans favored their own style of tax-cut-heavy stimulus; saying "TARP ought to be ended" is not the same as reversing himself on supporting it for the first two years), but others -- on abortion, assault weapons, and Reagan -- are troubling.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:52 AM | Comments (314)
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A fair point, for the general election, I guess.

“In the general election I’ll be pointing out that the president took the reins at General Motors and Chrysler — closed factories, closed dealerships laid off thousands and thousands of workers — he did it to try to save the business,” Romney said Wednesday on CBS.

But this is like Obama's stance on gay marriage. The left doesn't hold it against him because they know he's a dirty goddamned liar.

As regards GM, everyone knows the socialist in office just would have hit the taxpayers for more money to keep his clients in their jobs. But he didn't have the political heft to do more.

In Romney's case, it's known (or believed) that he's a capitalist, so he set out to fire lots of people (albeit, in dying companies that would lose lots of employees one way or the other).

So, for those who care about this, and for those who think that companies exist to provide them money -- Obama still wins out and Romney's liability remains a liability.

Now, I'm not one of those people who think that CEOs get up in the morning wondering, "What further public service can I provide via hiring workers I don't need?," but many less sophisticated people think they do think that, or should think that.

And Obama, armed with an unlimited credit card from the Bank of You, does think that way. Being unsophisticated himself.

@bendomench sent this. He thinks it shows Romney is a bit clueless about as far as what conservative opinion is. I don't think so, because Romney did say he'd offer this argument "during the general election." He knows conservatives aren't happy about the bailouts. He just means that Obama can't throw bombs about laying people off, because Obama's first foray into the business world -- coming, of course, during his term as president -- also involved a lot of layoffs.

Still, it's a general liability for Romney, this whole thing of being the Big Capitalist Banker-type Guy in a period in which such guys are pretty unpopular.

Posted by: Ace at 09:30 AM | Comments (220)
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Top Ten:

1 skinny LR 24 of 35 489pts
2 BearMageddon 26 of 35 481pts
3 Offensive or Obscene Name 27 of 35 480pts
4 I R A Darth Aggie 24 of 35 478pts
5 SCTV Network 90 26 of 35 474pts
6 RableRable 22 of 35 473pts
7 SockPuppetSteve 22 of 35 472pts
7 huerfano 25 of 35 472pts
9 misterdregs 24 of 35 468pts
10 waelse1 25 of 35 466pts

Remember everyone got to assign a confidence point value from 1 to 35 for each pick. So picking Alabama was worth 20 points to Skinny, but it was worth 35 to IRA Darth Aggie - he bet the farm on that one. The x of y thing is how many winners you picked.

Good show morons, and Happy Humpday.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:09 AM | Comments (205)
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Art Laffer on class warfare and the Buffett Rule.

The welfare state isnÂ’t redistributing wealth from rich to poor. ItÂ’s taking from the (relatively poor) young and giving to the (relatively wealthy) old. ItÂ’s an inherently unsustainable model (and a horribly unjust one at that), and it will collapse of its own accord at some point if we donÂ’t choose to reform it before then.

The welfare state's primary purpose is to subsidize the last years of Americans' lives, and the elderly are, after a lifetime of accumulation, better off than most Americans: In 2009, the net worth of households headed by adults ages 65 and older was a record 47 times that of households headed by adults under the age of 35 – a wealth gap that doubled just since 2005.

Posted by: Monty at 04:46 AM | Comments (363)
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Happy Wednesday, folks.

Reps. Darrel Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) have reintroduced a bill that would reject the NIH requirement that any published research that was funded by taxpayers be made available in the free, public NIH digital archive after publication. The bill would also make it illegal for other federal agencies to adopt similar open-access policies. They claim, ISYN, that the law is necessary to protect the sustainability of the research publishing industry.

The lifespan of the average nuclear scientist in Iran seems pretty short these days. "Magnetic" bombs? Didn't I see that in a movie?

The CDC says binge drinking is a bigger problem than previously thought. They used data from the past 30 days . . .

. . . which leads me to my last headlines this morning: all eyes on South Carolina, even last night. New Hampshire gets no respect. And finally, in an article about how conservatives are enabling a Romney win by splitting their votes among the not-Romneys, FreedomWorks' Matt Kibbe says his group is considering pushing another as-yet-undeclared candidate into the GOP primary fight. Let's just get sloppy drunk instead, 'kay?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:48 AM | Comments (212)
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Nah. I'm more Anyone But Nazi-Friendly Crank Paul than Anyone But Romney.

"The race is becoming more clearly a two-man race between establishment candidate Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the candidate of authentic change. That means there is only one true conservative choice.

"Ron Paul has won more votes in Iowa and New Hampshire than any candidate but Mitt Romney.

"Ron Paul and Mitt Romney have been shown in national polls to be the only two candidates who can defeat Barack Obama.

"And Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are the only two candidates who can run a full, national campaign, competing in state after state over the coming weeks and months. Ron Paul's fundraising numbers -- over $13 million this quarter -- also prove he will be able to compete with Mitt Romney. No other candidate can do all of these things.

"Ron Paul is clearly the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney as the campaign goes forward.

“We urge Ron Paul’s opponents who have been unsuccessfully trying to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney to unite by getting out of the race and uniting behind Paul’s candidacy."

Meanwhile, campaigning in South Carolina, Perry asks for people to (get this) look at his actual record.

"Give me a second look. Look at my record," Perry pleaded with voters in Anderson on Monday, the second day of a South Carolina tour that will take him up to the make-or-break January 21 presidential primary.

Perry finished a dismal fifth in Iowa's January 3 nominating contest and briefly considered dropping out of the 2012 Republican White House race before announcing last week he would skip Tuesday's New Hampshire primary and focus on South Carolina.

"I don't quit. I'm not about to quit on this country," he told a small crowd of supporters and diners at a restaurant in Anderson.

There was a time when records mattered to Republicans.

I'll be on FTRadio at 11 pm, live, to whine more about no one voting for my preferred candidate.

Posted by: Ace at 06:04 PM | Comments (532)
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Very, very busy today so tonight's ONT is going to be a DIY kinda thing.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:28 PM | Comments (389)
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I predict Romney wins and Paul comes in second.

Hack blogger, indeed.

Yeah... So Romney won, as expected.

In New Hampshire, they're looking at electability, which is fine, but I just don't know if Romney's as electable as people seem to think.

Posted by: Ace at 02:30 PM | Comments (961)
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I avoided it yesterday, but with the nerdrage over my Tolkein dis, I feel compelled to mention it now.

Some journalists were invited for a playtest, including one from Forbes and another one from the NYT. (No link; the NYT story is boring.)

What makes this sort of a story -- beyond the nerdcore element -- is that it's a business story.

See, I don't even want to admit that I know this, but-- Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition was extremely... controversial. Yeah I said it. It really changed the game, and mostly not in ways that people liked. It has been accused of turning the game into "World of Warcraft, Pencil and Paper Version," or, more accurately, "Magic: The Gathering with characters." In an effort to be more like other games which are far more popular, it alienated a lot of players.

Not me. I don't play this crap.

I just... know about it. None of your business how.

In business terms, they tried to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary, and revolutionary isn't a great idea, necessarily, if people actually already like your product. In addition, you'd better make sure your "revolutionary" changes aren't just, what's the word, often dumb. A mix of the clever, the neat, the interesting... and the straight-up just plain dumb.

And they began to make the game for hypothetical customers, dorks who played World of Warcraft and Magic: The Gathering and could, they thought, be induced to play D&D, if D&D more resembled those games.

But hypothetical customers aren't actual customers. Many of the actual customers hated the changes. For every one actual customer, there are thousands of possible customers who like this sort of thing, and it makes sense to make a play for those people... but you can't lose your actual audience while you're chasing that theoretical audience.

Now, the third edition (the previous edition) was popular and the RPG hobby had a huge renaissance during it. Actually a huge bubble and then a huge crash, but for a time, the RPG industry, which is barely a rounding error even in the category of specialty games, actually was making money.

Partly fueling that bubble was an Open License. For the first time, ever, the game was packaged with an open license. Homebrewers and wannabe D&D writers could actually just publish their own stuff for D&D, and it was all perfectly legal. The Open License allowed everyone to use D&D rules in perpetuity. Freely -- no royalties owed.

The theory was that if you could essentially corner the market by doing this, by unleashing a thousand garage game designers to write for your product, and even if you were losing, hypothetically, sales dollars to these "competitors," they really weren't full competitors-- because at the end of the day they were supporting, and generating a need for, your main product, the actual rules.

That part of it worked like the dickens.

But -- there's a downside to granting, to everyone in the world, a super-generous royalty free open license "in perpetuity." When this was first dreamed up, people asked the head of the D&D company, Ryan Dancey, Doesn't this mean people can just publish all your rules under their own covers and charge for it?

Dancey said, "It sure does!" But he didn't think that would be a problem because D&D would always have better production values which result, naturally, from an operation of some scale (at least a much larger scale than a guy in his garage cranking out illustration-free copies of the rules). So the threat of some competitor for the actual rules was pretty minor.

Except.

What happened was that D&D 4th was such a departure from the well-liked (and yet super-clunky) 3rd edition rules that... someone did in fact go ahead and start publishing the rules under the Open License, but it wasn't some guy in his garage. It was a somewhat-established game company, using a lot of the same artists who illustrated the actual D&D products.

And further, the anger over D&D 4 was so great people flocked to support this competitor company, which was actually simply publishing D&D 3rd edition under a different (lame) name, Pathfinder. And I hear that Pathfinder is actually... outselling the actual D&D game it's knocking off. Or at least it's too close for comfort.

So this is really a Coke/New Coke story, but with the added twist that, in this analogy, Coke actually licensed its old Coke recipe to anyone who wanted to make Coke, and someone did in fact start making Coke Classic under a different name.

And that began seriously cutting into New Coke's sales.

The new edition is a difficult business proposition, because the actual goal is to unify the D&D audience again and have them all buy actual D&D rulesets, which means they have to placate several different audiences (including people who have, ahem, "gone off the grid' and began playing "retro-clones," clones of first or second edition rules). And the idea is that somehow it will all be "modular" where you can choose from a variety of different rules to make your own perfect ruleset.

That sounds kind of impossible to me. After all, if people are just picking and choosing from four different rulesets and variations thereupon, why do they need One Big Book for that? Why can't they just buy some old edition they like secondhand?

But that is the Business Challenge they have. Somehow they have to unite two very different editions (and a couple of earlier, not quite as different editions) and make it all modular, such that their lost customers (the 3rd edition grognards) will come back, but that their loyal customers -- the ones who actually like 4th edition and have continued supporting it in their Time of Great Dividing -- will also not feel burned and punked out.

See: The loyal customers have been defending these changes all along, and supporting D&D with cash money. You can't really now tell them, Yeah, you were wrong, the 3rd edition boosters were right all along. Dummies. You suck for having supported us.

Oh, and they also have to convince everyone to shell out another $150 for the basic rules, and then hundreds more for the never-ending rules expansions.

Anyway, that's your nerd-news for the day.

Corrected: Initially I had a digression about the D&D MMORPG, which I'm told is just wrong in basic respects, so I've deleted that.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (353)
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