[Romney] stood at his event, staged in Wilmington in the gritty, cavernous work space at RC Fabricators, which puts up steel structures, and out of 600 or so people there, he singled out O'Donnell, prominently standing to his side.

Romney did not publicly recognize the presence of Mike Castle, the past governor and congressman who lost that infamous primary to O'Donnell. A past governor! In his own state! Nor did Romney bother to mention Greg Lavelle, the state representative who is his chief organizer here. (Lavelle got a better billing when he graciously welcomed Newt Gingrich two weeks ago.)

"I see one of my supporters over here, Christine O'Donnell. I didn't know you were going to be here," Romney said.

If Romney did not know, it is a marvel, because O'Donnell was the cause of furious behind-the-scenes maneuvering beforehand. Republicans who do not want to knock their all-but-certain nominee publicly are railing privately that Romney's campaign originally planned to have her introduce him, but party leaders went ballistic and had it stopped. Still, she got her moment.

An art student who wears Muslim headdress is defending her right to freedom of expression after a photo she snapped was removed from public display at a British Columbia university.

The large black and white print depicts a woman in full Islamic scarf and cloak holding a flower-embossed bra while folding laundry.
...
Not long after it had been hung in the school hallway, she overheard a woman who also wears a head scarf saying she had peeled the artwork off the wall.
...
The 24-year-old photographer, who grew up in small town Northern B.C. and has been studying at the B.C. Interior institution for several years, said the reaction was unexpected.

"I found it really intrusive," she said of the unilateral move to censor her work.
...
Since the incident was made public, an education centre in Kamloops funded by the Saudi Arabian Embassy has gone public with its opposition as well, Graham said.

The photo (which you can see the full version of here) is certainly striking. Angelina Chapin notes in Huffington Post Canada that the photo invites a much more extensive discussion about the role that lingerie plays in the Muslim world:

Via Mark Thoma, I learn that Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Narayana Kocherlakota doesn't think that the Fed should stick to its current policy of keeping interest rates low till 2014:

I would say that it would be appropriate to change the Fed’s current forward guidance to the public about the future course of interest rates. Currently, the FOMC statement reads that the Committee believes that conditions will warrant extraordinarily low interest rates through late 2014. My own belief is that we will need to initiate our somewhat lengthy exit strategy sometime in the next six to nine months or so, and that conditions will warrant raising rates sometime in 2013 or, possibly, late 2012.

Kocherlakota is not one of my favorite Federal Reserve board members. My own opinion is that tighter money now would be a terrible idea and would harm the economic recovery.

So when the one of the bank Presidents (who is not currently a voting member but will be again in 2014) expresses concern that this policy should be reversed, then there is a new level of doubt: how credibly can we take Federal Reserve statements when they come attached with a date?

Finally, Ryan’s critics make a huge leap in logic. It’s almost as stark as the one that equates selflessness with an eagerness to spend other people’s money. Just because he agrees with Rand on economics doesn’t mean he agrees with her on theology. Rand herself may have considered these two issues inextricable, but Ryan and her millions of other readers aren’t obligated to do so. You’re allowed a little more interpretive freedom when reading a mass-market novel like Atlas Shrugged than a party platform like The Communist Manifesto.

I'm not sure how helpful Bolduc is really being here, because in the process of trying to show that Ryan is not a Rand devotee, he lets it slip that Ryan still lets Rand's economic thinking influence his world view:

It’s worth noting that Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel writer Craig Gilbert, who reported Ryan’s remarks, didn’t attribute the same significance to this line that Ryan’s critics did. Rather, he used it as evidence for a broader point: that Ryan had “a world view shaped by such icons of individualism and free enterprise as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek.”

In various interviews, Ryan has identified other intellectual influences, such as his old economics professor Richard Hart, Wall Street Journal editorial-page editor Robert Bartley, and Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. In other words, Ryan believes in free-market economics (no surprise there), and he finds all these thinkers’ defenses of capitalism compelling. What’s the big deal?

Question:

Suppose Medicare doubles the price it pays for a knee surgery. Has the Medicare beneficiary become better off?

Your answer to that seemingly technical question will determine a great deal of where you stand on the great inequality debate.

Here's Jim Pethokoukis on the American Enterprise Institute blog today:

President Barack Obama has a theory of the case, yes he does. For the past 30 years, the living standards of middle-class Americans have gone nowhere even as the overall U.S. economy has grown markedly. The Obama explanation: Wealthier Americans grabbed all the money. Time to raise their taxes for the sake of “fairness.” ....

Farley ignited a firestorm of criticism, including a Republican ad that portrayed Abraham Lincoln as a "typical Midwesterner."

Roosevelt wrote a letter of criticism to Farley. When you refer to blocs of voters, Roosevelt said, you always compliment, never insult them. Had Farley referred to Kansas as a splendid Midwestern state, there'd have been no trouble.

What applied to Midwesterners then applies to at-home mothers now. There's a strong left-of-center culture-war temptation to denigrate them, dating back to Simone de Beauvoir's argument that women must be "forced to be free." That temptation to wage mommy wars has since been reinforced by class war, as increasingly only the most economically secure families can afford to withdraw mothers from the paid labor force.

Still, however tempting, you'd think it would be Politics 101: don't do it.

rob654: I think we would need to know more about that picture - is that a specific event at the HQ - or just a random photo taken at a random time - how many people work there (is this a small sub-group or is this most of the workers)?

Also, this may or may not be an indication of an issue with the campaign not including minorities - rather what is the educational background of the people they are hiring? Perhaps this is more an indication of something deeper in our society?

Another reader speculated that blacks simply may not be able to afford to work in low-paying campaign jobs:

Of course you could say that both Answer 1 and Answer 2 contain much truth, as in the old Saturday Night Live joke about the floor wax that is also a breath mint.

But here's the point that sways me most: if the surge in Medicare costs is driven primarily by demographics, why have healthcare costs also surged for the under 65 population? The cost of the typical family insurance policy doubled over the period from 2000 to 2008. Why?

Yes, the under-65 population is tilting more toward the older end of the spectrum.

And yes too, we are seeing the spread of health-negative conditions like obesity. 

Bryce McNitt writes on public policy and politics issues for a number of sites. He was a contributor at FrumForum from 2009-2011. He lives and works in the Washington area.

Family life in America is bad. You probably have some idea about this, but it’s worse than you think. How bad? The worst in the industrialized world for starters. Want a surreal indicator of this fact? Even children born to cohabiting (unmarried) parents in Sweden stand a lesser chance of experiencing their parents breaking up than children born to married parents in the US. Jaw dropping.

Dr. Mitch Pearlstein’s From Family Collapse to America’s Decline makes an unapologetic attempt to soberly address one of America’s most tragic, yet largely ignored, shortcomings over the last half of the last century: the decline and collapse of the American family. It is the erosion of marriage and family, argues Pearlstein, which can be found at the root of coinciding declines in educational performance, and subsequently economic performance of the generations of American children raised in broken or never-formed families.

Pearlstein’s narrative picks up with the Moynihan Report, which signaled the opening shot in the national discussion of a growing trend of family breakdown. The trend then was mostly limited to African American families, and that report was suppressed as an unacceptable criticism of that community at a time when it was pulling itself up from the depths of segregation and securing real civil rights for the first time. This unfortunate result, and the coinciding social movement of women from the home to the workplace drove public discussion of the issue underground for twenty years, and emerged only when the deleterious effects of broken families on the well-being of children was unequivocally confirmed in empirical data.

Pearlstein, founder and president of Center of the American Experiment, a non-partisan conservative think tank based in Minnesota, relies wholly on empirical evidence derived from the entire spectrum of the American and European university and think tank community, peppered with personal anecdotes gathered from a lifetime of academic and public policy work. The problem, he demonstrates again and again with study after study, is huge and is at its worst. For instance, as of 2008 a majority (55%) of teenagers aged 15 to 17 had not spend their entire life with both their birth mother and biological father.

Hilton Kramer, who died on March 27 at the age of 84, was a much more complicated man than is sometimes acknowledged. He was both a neoconservative cultural warrior who liked nothing better than plunging into a noisy, nasty battle and an exacting aesthete for whom life would have been impossible without the sustenance of art and literature. I certainly saw both sides of Hilton during the decade that I wrote for The New Criterion, beginning in the mid-1980s. When we went out for lunch in a little French restaurant in the West Fifties that Hilton admired for its tarnished savoir-faire, I think I recognized, behind his masklike self-confidence, traces of the young man from Massachusetts who had embraced intellectual and bohemian Manhattan with a lover’s ardor. And when I read his craziest polemics—there were times when he seemed to believe that The New York Times and The New York Review of Books were responsible for everything that was wrong with American culture—I knew that behind the fire and brimstone there was the pain of a brokenhearted lover, who despite his irrepressibly upbeat demeanor could not bear what Warholism had done to the world of artists and writers where he had always felt most at home. He was right about Warholism. He was right about political correctness. He was right about other things. The trouble was that the fight took on a life of its own, until the warrior in Hilton nearly crushed the aesthete.

As Mansfield Frazier reports:

The lily-white photo is all the more puzzling given that the president’s staffers have consistently managed to find persons of color to be on stage behind him at campaign events. How could a supposedly savvy political operation assemble such a monochromatic room? The photo is a testament to how overlooked diversity is in America. It doesn’t simply happen on its own, but has to be worked at. ... So the line for volunteers and paid staffers is very long, and the competition fierce—but all of those selected could not have just happened to be white absent racism on someone’s part.

To be sure, Romney's campaign also suffers from a similar problem. According to the Daily Beast:

Why do so many interpret Ozzie Guillen's remark, "I love Fidel Castro," as some sort of breath of ethnic decorum—rather than as an apologia for a vicious dictator? It's not only Cubans who despise Castro, or should despise him. Saying "I love Fidel Castro" is not the equivalent of saying "I hate the polka." It's the equivalent of saying, "I love Alexander Lukashenko" or "I love Augusto Pinochet."

Part 1:

The fiercest Washington dramas often turn out to concern ... accounting.

On April 10th, Washington debated a new report by Medicare trustee Chuck Blahous. The report argued that the healthcare reform of 2010 would increase federal deficits by much more than the Obama administration admits. The difference turned on this issue: should reductions in projected Medicare spending by measured against the CBO's current-services baseline or against existing federal law governing the Medicare trust funds?

Exciting!

A strong majority of readers thought the President's fairness theme was a winning message.

balconesfault: It's not that Obama says "fairness" that often.  
 
It's that the word is like fingernails on the chalkboard for today's Randian Conservatives, who don't really believe that fairness of opportunity is important to America, much much less fairness of outcome. 

Rick Santorum had a brilliant idea:

The Republican Party has become the preferred political vehicle of America's white working class. There should, therefore, be room in a Republican primary for a candidate who championed the interests of the non-rich; who offered an economic message that offered genuine hope for improvement to voters who have been hit hard by the 2008-2009 crisis and by the long years of middle-income stagnation before 2008.

It was a powerful concept, but Santorum could not manage to execute it. He fused one gimmick (a concessionary tax rate for manufacturing industry) to the generic Republican platform that favors the old and the wealthy over the young and the striving.

To some degree, Santorum was constrained by inner factors: his own strong ideological commitments.

But even more, he was constrained by the Republican campaign map. The activist economic program needed to accomplish what Santorum declared he wished to accomplish—stabilize working-class employment and thus working-class families—is simply anathema to the donors, media institutions, and activists who sway Republican primaries.

President Obama is making "fairness" his dominant theme of election 2012.

According to ABC News, he has been criticized by some centrist Democrats who point out that successful Democratic re-elects—1996 most notably—have emphasized non-populist themes of growth and prosperity. A study by centrist Democrat group Third Way has generated much attention by positing that swing independents, the crucial voting bloc in 2012, are wary of President Obama's theme of tax fairness.

It's time for you to weigh in. Is President Obama making a mistake by making "fairness" a dominant campaign theme in 2012? Vote now on Facebook!

The Daily Dish links to this study at the Economist about the difficulties attractive women face getting interviewed for jobs.

The Dish comments: "For attractive women, attaching a headshot to a resume isn't recommended."

But if you follow the link, you see that the Dish stepped on the lead and missed the fascinating reason why headshots are not recommended. The Economist version:

At first, Mr Ruffle considered what he calls the “dumb-blonde hypothesis”—that people assume beautiful women to be stupid. However, the photos had also been rated on how intelligent people thought each subject looked; there was no correlation between perceived intellect and pulchritude.

So the cause of the discrimination must lie elsewhere. Human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93% of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers’ unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates.

How to achieve energy independence?

That's the question I undertook to answer (in less than 400 words!) for the Jewish Policy Center.

[W]e have to start from this fact: energy security means paying more for energy—forever. The promise of cheap oil from North American sources is a false promise, and the promise of cheap fuel from non-oil sources (e.g. bio-fuels) is even falser.

When I was in college, I was taught the history of political philosophy through classes that focused on the "Great Books" of the genre. This meant that in a typical quarter, we read the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The arguments from each book were taken on their own merits and we were expected to explain the deep and well-reasoned arguments that led each author to the conclusions they reached.

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind takes that approach to studying politics and chucks it out the window, and we are all the better off for it. Now instead of struggling over essay prompts that ask "Why do Hobbes and Locke have such different views of political authority?" we can say, "The authors had different moral intuitions and they ran with them." It may not be academically satisfying, but it has the benefit of being true.

Haidt's The Righteous Mind is an impressive book that should be read by anyone who has the slightest interest in how political opinions are reached. The book seeks to explain "Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion." What is the psychological and biological basis to explain why we vote the way we do, and why we hate some politicians but love other ones? How can your likelihood of voting Democrat or Republican be explained by science?

The book has three parts each with one big lesson to teach. In Part 1, we learn that political opinions don't come from rationally developing arguments. You have intuitions first, and the reasoning for those intuitions comes post-hoc. To give one example, your highly developed reason for supporting higher or lower taxes likely stems from an intuitive feeling that you have (possibly "I earned my wealth!" or "It's unconscionable to be rich when so many are poor"). As one author Haidt cites notes:

We have strong feelings that tell us in clear and uncertain terms that some things simply cannot be done and that other things simply must be done. But it's not obvious how to make sense of these feelings and so we, with the help of some especially creative philosophers, make up a rationally appealing story [about rights].