I don't know what is in doner meat, but I'm pretty sure it's not actually veal...

The NRA ad almost made a very good point. The ad seemed to say "Obama's children are protected by armed guards - he thinks their more important than yours". This is quite a weak argument because, objectively, the President's children are at higher risk than ordinary children.

What is important is the unspoken assumption by all parties concerned that if a risk to children (or anyone else is perceived) having armed and trained people around them is an effective way of mitigating that risk.

Instead, the emphasis of the ad made it look more personal and ill-thought through than I suspect it was.

Would Richard A. Epstein flagrantly violate the CoC? Very funny memes,but maybe this isn't the best forum for these particular ones...

Surely a third category, of genuine quotes, would make sense. The obvious example being, "Roman riparian law ... is no joking matter".

Not me. And there's also the insane capriciousness of the new General Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR) which is intended to catch persons who don't comply with the spirit, as opposed to the letter, of tax laws. Surprise surprise, no one is absolutely sure of the line between ‘reasonable tax planning’ and ‘unacceptable tax avoidance’. 

Coriolanus more apt than TA?

This is precisely what worries me. The RNC should run a programme to give primary winners a chance to hone their positions, otherwise the ostensibly inchoate positions of an Akin or  Mourdock are always going to be hung around the neck of a Ryan or a Romney.

Have we become so cold?  So callous, that defending the innocent is no longer a worthy cause?

I'm not arguing that it's not a worthy cause, only that its worth thinking about whether it's prudent to bundle lots of social policies together and emphasise them in a political campaign at the expense of other important ideas in the knowledge that it will result in defeat.

Is all that faith has to do with politics concerned with traditional SoCon issues?

And why don't SoCons try to build a constitutional amendment movement instead of relying on the Republican party to (half-heartedly) echo their beliefs?

I think you're right: i'm not advocating dropping social issues altogether, just running  predominantly economy-based campaigns in the future (and maybe having a central Republican education centre so that inexperienced candidates know how to portray their social concerns without enabling a media storm).

As for turning out the base, I just can't see how if you cared about social issues, you wouldn't have turned out. Evangelicals don't strike me as particularly apathetic, but that seems to be the premise of a renewed SoCon focus.

It's not that they need to end the alliance with the evangelicals, just that when the Democratic opposition to everything which evangelicals hold dear is so blatant, what do conservatives have to gain by aggressively pushing a message that not enough people want to hear?

I can't log in... The log in dialogue box just keeps popping up after this is posted in the box:

-Tigh.GeekShed.net- *** Looking up your hostname...
-Tigh.GeekShed.net- *** Found your hostname (cached)
-Tigh.GeekShed.net- *** Checking ident...
-Tigh.GeekShed.net- *** No ident response; username prefixed with ~

Any suggestions?

(I am in the UK, if that's relevant.)

I'm ineligible to vote, in an inconvenient time-zone and supposed to be working but I still can't stop refreshing ricochet, powerline and drudge. Commitment to country or ideas might have something to do with it, but there's an element of junkyism to which one has to confess. Admitting you have a problem ...

There's necessarily some lag - growth figures aren't given in real time, remember. The graph also seems to annualise growth figures which stretches the recessions: January 2007 was definitely not when things started to go badly wrong.

Also, the key moment in the recession was the fall of Lehman in October/November 2008, and this caused a dramatic fall in oil prices. Before that, as I recall, everything was just sort of bumbling along, and nobody seemed to think the credit crunch was going to do much more than cause some big financial institutions to take a temporary hit.

This bears out my point to a certain extent, and also shows that regional uncertainty in the middle east has a pretty significant effect on oil prices.

I think what Obama meant was that global and US recessions cause  oil prices to decline: if there's less economic activity, there's going to be less demand for energy, therefore oil prices fall.  Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification, and the activities of OPEC, regulators, downstream energy companies and so on probably have a large effect, which I'm not knowledgeable enough to quantify.