I don't disagree, but I think we may just have to retreat to more defensible ground. The poor family threatened with deportation with the smiling kids and aged grandmother pull strongly at the heartstrings. The hard working, articulate man relegated to permanently toiling as a lawn boy or the pleasant young woman who will forever be cleaning toilets until she drops tug at the heartstrings. The middle class husband with a good job whining that he is not a full citizen and can't vote, eh, not so much. Given that this fellow cheated, I think most people will feel he got a good deal just the same. Maybe we can hold the status quo. But if we can't, I say let the libs make their big push for full amnesty and then we compromise with this. 

Norman Podhoretz wondered too: http://www.amazon.com/Why-Are-Jews-Liberals-Vintage/dp/0307456250/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323803211&sr=8-1-spell. The short answer is history.

This is a bit tangential, but it is a point regarding evolution that I think is often overlooked. When we look at any process, feature, or behavior of a living thing we tend to ask how it could confer an advantage to the organism assuming that evolution is a process of constant improvement. However, it is not and cannot be. If one considers the problem of global optimization, finding the best possible solution to a problem, one finds that algorithms that continuously improve fail miserably. The get caught in local maxima. Imagine the mountain climber who tried to scale Everest by only ever going up. He would reach the top of the first hill and have no where to go. To get to the peak he will have to occasionally go down into a valley before finding the way up higher. So it is with evolution. Organisms must often become maladapted to build up changes that may ultimately come together to improve beyond the orignial form. If evolution were just a process of continual optimization, it would have halted when the optimal paramecium was found. It isn't survival of the fittest, merely extinction of the most unfit.

I wonder if there isn't something almost Clontonian in Newt's misdemeanors. Billy's corruptions were so numerous and clear that people just accepted them as part of what he was and moved on. Because there is so much sludge to pour onto Newt, maybe it works to his benefit. With his straight as an arrow image, it might actually be easier to take Romney down as his mistakes would seem so much more disappointing.

For me it is like the old joke about your mother-in-law driving off a cliff in your Mercedes: mixed emotions. (but not my mother-in-law who is dandy and reads Ricochet.)

We are going through a financial collapse as big as if not bigger than the stock market crash of 1929, but unemployment is 9% not 30%, GDP hasn't contracted by serious double digits, there are no bread lines and the only Hoovervilles are those set up by pampered college kids. That is globalization for you. Diversified systems are more resilient to fault than monolithic ones. We get to draw from the strength of the thriving economies when we take a hit. The real problem we have now is that stupid statist policies are being followed nearly everywhere that we face the potential of a global depression. To the extent that is the fault of globalization, it is because the system is so tough no one can believe it can be taken down that hard.

This is like being told you have cancer and turning around and asking your doctor "what can we do in the short run?". Uh, there's no 'short run' fix for that!

Having got out of Oakland just in time, I can say that my impression is that if anything the cops go to easy on the these professional rioters.

That was an excellent interview, but you did let one slip by you. When it was pointed out that we had very high marginal rates and very high growth, you correctly pointed out that there were lots of loopholes so little of that tax was actually paid. Good so far, but all that growth really happened because Europe had just immolated itself. It is pretty hard to not to be generating lots of wealth when you are the only industrialized nation left standing. One would also note that very high magical rates probably contributed to the double dip during the latter part of the Great Depression. That government spent its revenues more efficiently back in the fifties may be so, but it isn't a ver compelling (or Libertarian) argument for the prosperity of the post war era.

Maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part, but I get the feeling his shtick isn't working. These people aren't stupid; they know they are getting played. I don't expect anyone to publicly attack Obama, but I suspect there are going to a lot of black voters staying at home next November.

A neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. I don't know what you call a guy who stays liberal after the mugging...

Isn't there a similar effect for cars? Often the cars that sell beyond expectation are the ones that many thought were ugly or really hated. I think in both cases the it depends on strong emotions. Cute just doesn't elicit a strong response; it's vanilla. A girl you really like or really don't does. Strong feelings are probably the source of high response rates.

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't schizophrenia have observable effects on the brain, particularly a shutting down of the frontal lobe? Couldn't we then produce an objective test for the disease that would not rely purely on subjective "expert" opinion? When so many sufferers live on the streets in their own filth (too many to count here in San Francisco), anything would be an improvement. Another interesting fact which I recall but no longer have a reference to is that that if you add together the incarceration rate with the rate of the involuntarily committed today and compare it with the same for the 1950's, you get a very similar value. The difference is that now we jail many more. It seems that many mentally I'll people just end up in prison with no hope of proper treatment. Can a mental hospital be any worse?

Midge, I agree with you completely. Children need to be taught self discipline and it is a parent's job to do that. Left to their own devices, kids will give up in things that they are good at and would in the end really enjoy doing. My plan for my own son is to apply the no quitting till you see it through rule. If he sings up for little league and wants to quit because he decide he "hates" baseball, fine, but not until the season is through. If he's taking piano lessons he can stop, but only after the next recital. Hopefully that will strike the right balance between pushing him to stick with things but not forcing him to do stuff that he genuinely has no interest in. Of course I can say this now because he's a baby. We'll see how this works out when he has something to say about it.

My wife is a music scholar and musician. In her experience many kids trained like this grow into technically flawless, artistically souless performers. When I was studying physics, at least half the graduate students were Chinese but maybe onle one or two of the faculty were. The Chinese we proficient at slogging through the technical details of a calculation but lacked the creativity and the social abilities to collaborate with their peers necessary to succeed as a working scientist. China has plenty of trained programmmers who produce nothing of interest in the world of software (Baidu, the closest they've got, succeeds because they cloned Google and have a cozy, subservient relationship with the ChiCom government). Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Chinese Mommy I'd say.

I don't need the Internet to ruin my concentration; my nine month old does the job just fine.