“‘It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,’ Romney told reporters when asked about his effective tax rate. ‘The last ten years my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past rather than ordinary income or rather than earned annual income.'” [CNN]

“One thing that really stands out in this poll is the extent to which Obama has claimed the middle. He’s up 68-27 on Romney with moderates. He also leads by 20 points with voters under 45, a group there’s been some concern about slippage with, and he has a 66-30 advantage with Hispanics.” [Public Policy Polling]

Back in college, we ran for student-body preznident. We promised nothing, played solitaire at the debate — and came within twenty-five votes of the runoff.

The next year, we recruited thirty-one of our friends to run for preznident, because students demanded a choice. It was the longest ballot in campus history.

We called it “participatory satire”, and we were quite proud.

So when we heard that Stephen Colbert — who announced too late for the South Carolina primary, which doesn’t allow write-ins — solved the problem yesterday by claiming Herman Cain!’s votes for his own, it felt like old times. Especially the part where he asked Democrats to vote on the Republican open ballot this Saturday.

The emailed press release, after the break.

Read more »

Steve Jobs — to reference Apple a third time — was infamous for his ability to bend perception to his will. Whatever your conventional wisdom, whatever your reasoning, spend five minutes in a room with him, and he’d have you thinking otherwise.

It soon became known as his “reality distortion field”, and because Steve Jobs had World-Historical Instincts, he usually was right. Might have been the acid he dropped.

In preznidential politics, the closest we’ve seen to Jobs-quality reality-bending in living memory was Ronald Reagan. Had you watched his second debate with hapless Jimmy Carter, you would have immediately understood, as we did, that America wanted the charming charlatan to lead it, that Our Exceptional Nation preferred to live a lie rather than suffer in truth.

Reagan won by projecting confidence and optimism — never mind the reality — and successful candidates have followed his lead ever since. It’s not as easy as it looks. Reagan had decades of practice, shilling for one group or another. He knew how to work a room, and a crowd. Ronald Reagan was a natural.

Unlike Mitt Romney.

Read more »

Have you ever read the full text of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”?

Perhaps you know a key passage:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

[…]

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

After the jump, your chance to read the rest.

Read more »

In the year of national polling data that RealClearPolitics has on Jon Huntsman, he never broke past 5 percent — and only hit the nickel twice, in December. His entire candidacy can be defined as a margin of error. Yet we were supposed to take him seriously because Important People Told Us So.

Forget Trump. Forget Cain. Jon Huntsman was the Joke Candidate of the Year.

People have been trying to figure out who would be the Anti-Romney in the Republican field since forever.  Yet, there was one guy who was the undisputed Anti-Nutjob. There was one guy who stood up and, without saying it explicitly, declared what we all knew to be true: “you people are insane.”

It’s a weird tag on the guy. By most observations, Jon Huntsman, who according to reports is dropping out and set to endorse Mittens, was as conservative on most things as the others.  But the fact that committed several cardinal sins — serving the Obama administration, suggesting that climate change might actually have some science behind it, etc. — doomed his run, almost from the start.

The fact that Huntsman’s Ticket To Ride from New Hampshaah was to a political hospice surprises absolutely nobody.  But the departure is somewhat sad, nonetheless.  Some people thought that his dog of a campaign was cute — acting like it was people and everything.  They’ll be disappointed, surely.  Meanwhile, us dirty hippies are left with Mittens, Frothy, Newtie, the leader of the rEVOLution, and (at least for the next week) Ranger Rick as the only real possible opponents for Black Eagle.  If we were forced to choose between any of those clowns (should The Worst happen), we would take Huntsman over any of them, in a heartbeat.  Thus, the last chance for somebody with at least a tenuous grip on reality taking the GOP nod has come and gone.

And so: good night, sweet prince.  Let sane, rational angels sing thee to thy mansion.