Politics as Usual

Dave Weigel, after noting that another alleged "gaffe" was nothing of the kind, says,

This has been the umpteenth installment in our ongoing series, "What the hell is wrong with everybody?"

How Much Does Political Spending Matter?

Buzzfeed:

A summer of vast campaign spending and dark warnings about sinister, secret donors is on the verge of being replaced by a fall in which rich men spend a lot of time explaining to their wives why they wasted millions of dollars.

That's my impression, too. I could still end up eating my words on this one, but so far it looks to me like the huge sums of money spent by rich conservatives have mostly fattened the wallets of consultants and tv networks. Sheldon Adelson's $10 million did nothing for Newt Gingrich, and whatever huge sum he is spending on Romney is not likely to help much, either.

I suspect these men would have much better luck if they concentrated on Congressional races or even state house races. When the voters know little about the candidates, a million dollars can make a difference, but really any American who cares already knows more than enough about Obama and Romney to make a decision. Especially in the battleground states, people are already sick of political ads and mostly tune them out.

Bonobos, Chimps, Fatherhood, and the Origins of Human Society

I've been reading Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, a large format book with text by primatologist Frans de Waal and amazing photographs by Frans Lanting (1997). It's a fascinating book, full of information but highly readable, and I recommend it.

What started me thinking hard was some speculation de Waal throws out about the origins of human society. Compared to chimps and bonobos, the immediately striking thing about primitive human cultures is the centrality of the family. Hunter-gatherers have at least three different kinds of strong bonds: male-male bonds, female-female bonds, and the family made up of mother, father, and offspring. Chimps and bonobos have the first two but they have no families. So far as we can tell, neither chimps nor bonobos have any idea who the father of an infant is. Among both species mothers of young offspring tend to be suspicious of males. This is especially so among chimps, where new mothers separate themselves from the group and live largely alone because of fear that a male might kill their babies. Among bonobos infanticide has not yet been observed, but mothers are still careful around males and they stick to the center of a group of females, keeping males away on the edges.

De Waal thinks that once humans began living on the savanna, mothers could no longer support themselves and their offspring without male help. They therefore needed the father to hang around and provide support. The father would only do this if he was fairly sure the baby was his. Thus, de Waal speculates, one of the key events in human evolution is the recognition of paternity, and this in turn is the root of the "homicidal jealousy" of the human male. Since chimp and bonobo fathers make no investment in their offspring, the promiscuity of their mates is of small concern to them. But for human males, the key evolutionary fact is that they can increase the survival of their offspring by investing heavily in their upbringing. And they generally do, but only if they have good reason to believe that the babies are really theirs. Seen this way, many things about human tribal societies make much more sense.

Grand Rapids Art Prize 2012

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, they hold a big open to everybody art contest, and they let the public vote on the winners. You can peruse photographs of the entries here.

There are over a thousand in all, but I yesterday I was incapacitated by illness and so bored that I scrolled through the whole thing and clicked on about a hundred thumbnails. It was interesting, in a way, a tour of the lower wrung of professional art in America. There is much that makes me hope the artists are 16, and a fair amount of religious schlock. Lots of junk sculpture -- sculpture made from found metal bits has penetrated more deeply into the American folk mind than any other sort of modern art. These are Chained Dream by Jim Pallas, one of what he says is a series of "moon works," and Junk Yard Music Box by Tom Kaufmann, a "human powered automated musical instrument made entirely from recycled materials."

There are works that seems like good ideas but are clumsily executed, a category in which I would place the above, Stick-to-it-ive-ness, by Richard Morse, installed in the Grand River. Semi-abstract horses running on water is such a fine notion that some city with a river should commission a better version from a sculptor who can make steel flow. And of course there are other artists with skill or energy but nothing much to say.

At the top, a photograph of reflections in melting snow by Dennis Nielsen, Staring Below to See Above,  which I like very much. Above, Trees, by Karin Nelson, a woman who taught herself to paint in her 50s and ended up as a feature on the local tv news, as she proudly tells us.

Above, Autumn Leaves II by Randi Ford, a nice example of style for which (as my regular readers know) I have a great weakness. Below, Dragon, by Robin Protz, a work made of buttons suspended on thread by woman who is, she says, not much like the typical artist.

The Situation in Afghanistan

Fred Kaplan:

The latest news from Afghanistan only underscores what’s been clear for quite some time: that there is no light at the end of the tunnel in this war, no noble way out, not much point to staying in.

No Man is an Island

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

--John Donne

And in Libya

Anti-militia protesters stormed the Benghazi headquarters of Ansar al-Sharia, the radical groups suspected of killing US diplomats, and burned it to the ground. About 30,000 people participated in the anti-militia march.

Which I think is the best news in months.

Sitting with the Dead

The heart of many traditional human death rituals is to sit with the corpse until it is buried or burned. This impulse is ancient, and it is not exclusively human:

On 10 October 2003, a researcher watched as a female elephant named Eleanor collapsed. Her swollen trunk had been dragging on the ground while her ears and legs displayed evidence of another recent fall. One of her tusks was broken. An elephant named Grace, a member of a different social group, galloped towards Eleanor and tried to heave Eleanor back to her feet with her massive tusks, but Eleanor's back legs were too weak. The rest of the herd had moved on, but Grace remained with Eleanor at least another hour, until the sun disappeared below the horizon and night fell over Kenya. Eleanor died the following morning at 11am. . . .  Over the course of several days, the carcass was visited by five other elephant groups, including several families that were completely unrelated to Eleanor. The elephants sniffed and poked the body, touching it with their feet and trunks. Even though the carcass had been visited by jackals, hyenas, vultures, and was under the control of lions by the fourth day, the elephants were rarely more than a few hundred metres away during daylight hours.

Pyramidal Etruscan Tombs

Archaeologists working near Orvieto, Italy, have discovered a complex of pyramidal, rock-cut Etruscan tombs. The best thing about this discovery, to me, is the way it was made. The investigators were poking around a modern wine cellar, cut into the soft, volcanic rock of a hill, when they noticed stairs leading down that appeared to be Etruscan:

As they started digging, [the archaeologists] noted that the cave's walls were tapered up in a pyramidal fashion. Intriguingly, a series of tunnels, again of Etruscan construction, ran underneath the wine cellar hinting to the possibility of deeper undiscovered structures below.

After going through a mid-20th century floor, George and Bizzarri reached a medieval floor. Immediately beneath this floor, they found a layer of fill that contained various artifacts such as Attic red figure pottery from the middle of the 5th Century B.C., 6th and 5th century B.C. Etruscan pottery with inscriptions as well as various objects that dated to before 1000 B.C.

Digging through this layer, the archaeologists found 5 feet of gray sterile fill, which was intentionally deposited from a hole in the top of the structure.

"Below that material there was a brown layer that we are currently excavating. Intriguingly, the stone carved stairs run down the wall as we continue digging. We still don't know where they are going to take us," Bizzarri told Discovery News.

The material from the deepest level reached so far (the archaeologists have pushed down about 10 feet) dates to around the middle of the fifth century B.C. "At this level we found a tunnel running to another pyramidal structure and dating from before the 5th century B.C. which adds to the mystery," George said.

Archaeology doesn't get much cooler than that.

Charles Montgomery, The Shark God

Charles Montgomery is a Canadian journalist whose great-grandfather was a pioneering Anglican missionary in the Solomon Islands. In 2002, with some money saved and no pressing obligations, he followed his ancestor's path to the South Seas. A secular unbeliever, he saw himself as a sort of reverse missionary, interested in helping the islanders preserve their traditional culture. When he got back he wrote a book, The Shark God: : Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific (2004). The Shark God is at times hard to read, because the writing is choppy and Montgomery sometimes presents himself as a jerk, but it left a very strong impression on my mind.

The Solomon Islands have not had an easy time since independence in 1978. There has been little economic development, and in 2000 to 2002 the sporadic violence of tribal society erupted into something like a civil war. Montgomery ends up writing mostly about the role of religion, both Christian and native, in the islands' troubles. This is a fascinating exploration, and I found it well worth following Montgomery's adventures to see his growing insight into the situation.

When he arrives in the islands, Montgomery is greeted by missionaries. He runs into missionaries everywhere -- Anglicans, Seventh Day Adventists, Pentacostals, Catholics, and more. He wonders why, since the islands have been Christian for a century, and every missionary he meets talks up the great success of Christianity. He soon learns, though, that although most Solomon Islanders are in some sense Christian, they have not given up their ancestral beliefs. They speak constantly of kastom, the pidgin word for the old ways, and in practice each Solomon Islander observes his or her own combination of Melanesian kastom and Christianity. Even ministers and priests mingle the two traditions. When Montgomery meets a man who claims to be the "shark boss," and to command a giant shark that rules one large lagoon, he asks the man where he prays to the shark.

"What do you mean, where? I pay in the cathedral. The Catholic church."
"I can't imagine the priest is happy about that."
"He doesn't mind. He knows the shark is not a devil. He knows he is my ancestor and that he gives me good power."

As he explores the islands and meets a range of religious practitioners, Montgomery comes to understand that there is a deeper weakness in the islanders' Christianity. To many of them, Jesus is just another famous ancestor, important because of the power he can give to the living. Christian symbols function like kastom stones, as repositories of mana that can be used to heal the sick or to curse enemies. Very little is said about the sacrifice of Jesus or the promise of heaven. It is a Christianity very much of the here and now.

One of the leading religious groups in this cacophony is the tasiu, or Melanesian Brotherhood. The brotherhood is a group of Anglican men who take vows of celibacy and poverty and travel the islands battling black magic and preaching Christianity. Many people hold them in awe, and Montgomery hears many stories about their magic. They all carry carved walking sticks believed to have magic powers -- for example, it is widely held that no one can lie while touching one of these sticks. At first Montgomery hears about the tasiu from other islanders, and they come across as just another groups of formidable magic wielders:

Eli lowered his voice. The tasiu, he said, was a powerful man of God. He lived with his apprentices on a hill near Vureas Bay. He had a magic walking stick. Wherever Eli had tried to promote kastom, the tasiu had smashed it. Even as we spoke, the tasiu was hunting down kastom stones, exorcising their spirits, wiping away their power. The tasiu confronted the owers of those stones: he told them they must wrap their hands around his magic walking stick and confess their crimes or face a terrible punishment from God. "I tell you," said Eli, "it is not easy being a kastom chief these days." (171)

But as Montgomery gets to know some of the tasiu, he finds them very down to earth, and without any great animosity toward kastom. Their main work, in this year of trouble, was trying to keep the simmering conflict between various factions from exploding into all-out war. The biggest trouble was between residents of Guadalcanal, the biggest island, and the neighboring island of Malaita, many of whom had moved to the capital city of Honiara. The tasiu work at settling conflicts, returning kidnap victims, getting people to give up the automatic weapons that had been looted from government armories. Montgomery watches as one of the brothers defused a potentially deadly encounter by stepping between the rival groups, falling to his knees and beginning to pray.

Because of this and other encounters, Montgomery's attitude toward both Christianity and kastom shifts. In the Solomons, Christianity is a force against superstition, especially the fear of black magic that turns some islanders into paranoid wrecks. Christianity is also a force for peace, especially in the person of the Melanesian Brotherhood. If you read a western account of the peace that was eventually reached in the islands, enforced by 2300 mostly Australian soldiers, it concerns actions by government officials and foreign diplomats. (Here's one at wikipedia.) The islanders Montgomery meets have a completely different view; to them it was he sacrifice of the tasiu, five of whom were killed by the most notorious warlord, that led to peace. One of the victims was Montgomery's friend Brother Francis, the same man who had fallen on his knees in prayer to avert a violent clash as Montgomery looked on. Here, Montgomery sees, is the true spirit of Christianity, and he thinks that through the brotherhood's sacrifice the islanders might learn about Christianity as a different attitude toward the universe, not just another source of magic.

The best thing about The Shark God is that Montgomery offers no pat resolution of these perplexities. Some of the book's most appealing characters are very much partisans of the old ways, dismissive of Christianity as somebody else's kastom. Others, like Brother Francis, believe that only Christianity can save the islands from the rivalries fueled by sorcery. Others are befuddled, like the Minister of Reconciliation, who vents his frustration to Montgomery in a hotel bar:

"We have been wrong in our ways. We have so many riches. Where did all those riches go? What is wrong with us? What does God want us to do? How can we know his mind?" (205)

To me, the situation of the Solomon Islands seems depressingly familiar. Around the fringes of the modern, westernized world are many such societies: on Indian reservations, in Middle Eastern villages, in the African bush. To be half in and half out of the western world is a curse. Some people seem to navigate it well, but for others it is a nightmare, and they live torn between kastom that seems outmoded even to them and an alien way of living. Charles Montgomery's book is a fascinating meditation on the spiritual side of this dilemma, and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in these issues.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan

The government declares a day of peaceful protest, and 20 people are killed.

The Haarbergs in Iceland

More from my new favorite nature photographers, Orsolya and Erlend Haarberg. I'm home sick today and I've just spent an hour perusing their web site, marveling.

The 47% and Voter Self-Interest

Cynics, like Mitt Romney in his by-now-famous 47% line, think that people simply vote their own interests. In his formulation, people dependent on government handouts vote Democratic to insure that their handouts continue. Actually, this is not true at all, and this is a very interesting fact.

A cynic would imagine that rich people vote for low taxes and less social spending, while poor people vote for higher taxes and more social spending. On average, this is true, but as Brian Caplan shows in this article,  the effect is much smaller than you might think:

Moving from the lowest to the highest income category reduces the probability of being a Democrat by only 9.6 percentage points, and increases the probability of being a Republican by only 11.2 percentage points. In contrast, black ethnicity increases the probability of being a Democrat by 32.5 percentage points. . . . Male gender by itself reduces the probability of being a Democrat by 6.4 percentage points -- an estimated effect greater than a fall in family income from $45,000 to less than $10,000.

Economic interest matters in how people vote, but it is not the determining factor. Education matters more; if you ask, "Are taxes too high?", the answers people give depend much more on education than income, with the better educated saying "no" and the less educate saying "yes."

As I have noted before, many American conservatives have little interest in free market economics, and consider themselves conservative because they want a more religious nation, or one more attached to traditional social attitudes. How people feel about gay marriage is, right now, a better predictor of party affiliation than beliefs about taxation and regulation.

To me the key is identity. People vote their identities much more than their interests, and this explains why so many poor people dependent on government assistance vote Republican, and so many rich people vote Democratic.

What Politicians Have to Put Up With

Kevin Drum was less impressed by Romney's 47% line than from another part of the same video, this question from the audience:

Audience member: How are you going to win if 54 percent of the voters think China's economy is bigger than ours? Or if it costs 4 cents to make a penny and we keep making pennies? Canada got it right a month ago. Why isn't someone saying, "Stop making pennies, round it to the nearest nickel?" You know, that's an easy thing, compared to Iran. I want to see you take the gloves off and talk to people that actually read the paper and read the book and care about knowing the facts and acknowledges power. As opposed to people who are swayed by, you know, what sounds good at the moment. If you turned it into like, "Eat what you kill," it'd be a landslide. In my humble opinion.

Drum:

See? This is the kind of stuff you have to put up with at these events. I mean, what the hell is this guy even talking about? It's a mystery. But whatever it is, I'll bet he thinks it's the wisdom of ages. And since Romney wants his $50,000, he has to smile and pretend it makes sense. Welcome to politics.

chair

Landmannalaugar, Iceland

By Orsolya and Erlend Haarberg. From National Geographic. Many more amazing pictures at their web site.

Katha Pollitt on Naomi Wolf

Another reviewer savages Wolf, leaving me to wonder, after so many bad books and terrible reviews, why are we still paying attention.

Perhaps opinion-mongering, black-and-white thinking and relentless TMI are the price of remaining a world-class celebrity feminist. In any case, that process has surely reached a nadir with Vagina: A New Biography. What a silly book! 

By now the whole world knows that the story began when Wolf found her orgasms becoming merely clitoral, losing their “Technicolor” glow and feeling of oneness with the universe. Surgery for a trapped pelvic nerve fixed her right up, which led Wolf to her big “discovery”: like every other sentient part of the body, the vagina is connected, through the nervous system, to the brain! Furthermore, every woman’s wiring is different! No wonder a touch that thrills one woman doesn’t do much for another. That is actually a useful point: even today, women fake orgasms rather than ask for what they want, and men can be quick to judge if what worked with one girlfriend doesn’t work with the next. Unfortunately, having “discovered” that every woman is sexually unique, she proceeds to write 300 more pages arguing that they are all the same, i.e., just like Naomi Wolf. . . . It’s lucky vaginas can’t read, or mine would be cringing in embarrassment that Vagina is what millions think of as feminism.

Why Are the Neocons Still Around?

Paul Pillar wants to know why the architects of the Iraq war -- Wolfowitz, Cheney, et al. -- are still taken seriously and widely quoted when they take public positions:

One mistake should not condemn someone to silence, but we are not talking about just any old mistake. The Iraq War was one of the biggest and costliest blunders in the history of U.S. foreign relations. The human and material costs, including an ultimate fiscal and economic toll in the multiple trillions in addition to the political and diplomatic damage, have been immense. Moreover, promotion of that war demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of fault lines in the Middle East, political culture in the region, the nature of political change there, the roots of enmity and security threats toward the United States, and the limitations of U.S. power and especially military power. There is no reason anyone should pay one iota of attention to what the promoters of that war have to say today on anything related to those subjects. And yet those are the very sorts of subjects, often with particular reference to countries such as Iran, Syria and Libya, on which neocon promoters of the Iraq War expound today.

 In some other political system, anyone who had been involved in an official capacity in promoting that war might, after resigning in disgrace, retire from public affairs to tend a garden, write fiction, or make money in private business. But somehow that has not happened with many of the people concerned in this instance.

Things the President Cannot Do

George Will:

In Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, the crumbling of old regimes and hierarchies has ignited complex sectarian and tribal power struggles in which some participants find anti-Americanism useful. None of the people involved — some cunning, some deranged — take their cues from utterances by America’s president. So it was passing strange for Rich Williamson, former assistant secretary of state and current Romney adviser, to say, regarding the Egypt and Libya attacks, “There’s a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation.”

Childlike credulity about presidents’ abilities to subdue turbulent portions of the world by projecting “strength,” or to “manage” the domestic economy, encourages political infantilism.

Of course this is equally true about the domestic economy, over which the president has limited influence. One thing I find encouraging about the current election is that people seem to understand that the bad economy is not entirely Obama's fault, which suggests that they know the president does not have magic powers.

A Fire Tornado on Video

David Gran shot this video of a fire tornado in Australia's outback.

Rats Under the House, or Environmental Archaeology in Action

Today we were digging a shallow pit feature full of brick rubble on the newer part of our site, which dates to around 1820 to 1920. I think this was the remains of a brick pier from which all the usable brick had been robbed. Robbed foundations are a common feature of archaeological sites, and they are usually full of the broken pieces the "robbers" -- I would prefer "recyclers" -- left behind. (Above, Emily starts digging a similar feature.)

But when we removed all the rubble and the dark pit fill, we did not find clean subsoil. The soil under the bricks was obviously disturbed, spotted with gray stains. We messed around with this for a couple of hours, before we discovered that this effect had been created by tunneling. The ground under this brick pier (if that's what it was) was shot through with tunnels and cavities. My first thought was groundhogs, the great diggers in this part of the world, but these tunnels are too small.

Then we found these bones. I am no expert on rodent bones, but I suspect these are a lower jaw and broken skull of Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat. So these were rat tunnels. And that reinforced the argument that this feature was a building foundation, because on a farm rats almost always live under buildings.

Why I Don't Believe in Molecular Clocks

There is noise in the science news today about a new calculation for the human mutation rate, and therefore a new set of dates in the "molecular clock" of human evolution. The molecular clock is a method for calculating how long ago two species or sub-species diverged by comparing their genomes: the more differences, the longer ago they diverged. The new dates suggest that modern humans left Africa around 120,000 years ago, not 60,000 as we heard a few years ago.

Obviously molecular dating is true in a rough way, but I think attempts to calculate an average rate of change, and therefore to pin precise dates on evolutionary events, are pseudo-science.

Consider some problems with the method:

To make it work, you have to know the length of a generation, that is, the average age of parents when they produce offspring. Among known human societies, this number varies by as much as 25%, depending on the richness of the environment, the adult death rate, and social factors. How can we possibly calculate the average age of parents in a species like Australopithecus afarensis that is known only from a few hundred fossil bones?

Recent studies also show that older parents pass on more mutations to their children, which would mean that any changes in the age of parents would also change the mutation rate.

Mutation rates are not really random, anyway; poisons of a million different kinds can increase the mutation rate (that's why they cause cancer), so environmental factors like diet and exposure to wood smoke in poorly ventilated huts or caves might also change the rate.

What about cross-breeding between species or sub-species? There is evidence now that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and perhaps other human varieties. I am not yet convinced of this, but it seems to be true that wolves and coyotes interbreed freely, so why not different species of hominids? What effect would this cross-breeding have on calculations of divergence times?

I could go on, but that's enough for now. These precise-looking calculations are bogus, plain and simple.

The Three Gorges Dam

China's Three Gorges Dam became fully operational in July. So far, no ecological catatrophes, although there have been numerous damaging landslides along its lake. The dam is one of the world's largest power stations, with a capacity of 22,500 MW. Other statistics:

Made of concrete and steel, the dam is 2,335 m (7,661 ft) long and the top of the dam is 185 metres (607 ft) above sea level. The project used 27.2 million cubic metres (35.6×106 cu yd) of concrete (mainly for the dam wall), 463,000 tonnes of steel (enough to build 63 Eiffel Towers) and moved about 102.6 million cubic metres (134.2×106 cu yd) of earth.[24] The concrete dam wall is 181 metres (594 ft) high above the rock basis. When the water level is at its maximum of 175 metres (574 ft) above sea level, which is 110 metres (361 ft) higher than the river level downstream, the dam reservoir is on average about 660 kilometres (410 mi) in length and 1.12 kilometres (3,700 ft) in width. It contains 39.3 km3 (31,900,000 acre·ft) of water and has a total surface area of 1,045 square kilometres (403 sq mi).

One thing we don't know yet is how much sediment is being trapped by the dam. If it traps as much as some critics fear, its lake will fill in a few decades, and coastal sediments downstream, including the site of Shanghai, will experience severe erosion.

Today's Roman Mosaic

Just uncovered in Antiochia ad Cragum, on the southern Turkish coast.

Uncertainty

What Romney actually believes is an unusually tricky question fraught with metaphysical and epistemological uncertainty.

--Ezra Klein

A Riot of Earthenware

The well in the older part of our site, filled around 1820, has been producing a plethora a large sherds from red earthenware vessels.

All of this came out either late yesterday afternoon or today, within quite a small area. In the upper left is a medium-sized bowl, probably made in Philadelphia. Upper right are five sherds from a small milk pan. Lower right is a sherd from a dish in the Pennsylvania German style. In the bottom center are five sherds from a jar; all the other vessels are have lead-based glaze, but this one has an iron oxide glaze. Lower left are three sherds from a large storage jar.

A close-up of the Philadelphia bowl.

On Ghost Stories

We have recourse to magic and belief in the supernatural when what exists isn’t what we want.

-- Michael Dirda

Batalha Monastery, Portugal

Mosteiro Santa Maria da Vitória, usually called the Batalha Monastery, is a Dominican convent in Batalha, Portugal. The monastery was commissioned by King John I of Portugal to celebrate a victory he won over the Castilians in 1385.

Construction of the monastery began in 1386 and continued into the 16th century. The names of all the supervising architects are known, beginning with Afonso Domingues from 1385 to 1402.

The monastery was never actually finished, and one of the most famous parts is the unfinished chapels, commissioned by King Duarte I in 1437.

For a building constructed over such a long period of time, it has an amazing unity of vision.

Yo, Mitt, You're Talking About Me

If he whole internet can be believed, Mitt Romney said this at a Republican fundraiser:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

I would just like to go an record saying that I support Barack Obama, and I have paid income tax every single year of my adult life. Our family's health care has been paid by my job or my wife's throughout our marriage. We pay our own mortgage, and buy our own food.

Mr. Romney, if you really think that only a freeloader could support a generous welfare state, then you are an idiot, with no knowledge of either history or human nature. And if you don't believe it but just said it to please an audience of Republican millionaires, you need to make a whopper of an apology, and then stop saying whatever you think will please the people you need to please at the moment.

David Frum Explains Mitt Romney's Polling Problems

In a series of tweets, David Frum gave this response to a Politico story about turmoil within the Romney campaign:

The Romney campaign has a messaging problem because it has a policy problem. The policy problem is that the Romney campaign offers nothing but bad news to hardpressed Americans and the broader middle class. . . .

How do you message: I'm doing away w Medicaid over the next 10 yrs, Medicare after that, to finance a cut in the top rate of tax to 28%?

Over course of campaign, Romney has changed from a pragmatic, capable manager into a dog-whistling culture warrior

What voters really care about, Frum says, is

what will this presidency do for me? And "dick you over" is not a winning answer