Just in case you needed confirmation.

Yes, Ron Paul approved his racist newsletters:

Newt Gingrich now complains that he performed poorly last night because Mitt Romney stacked the hall with supporters who cheered more at Romney's remarks than his own.

I was not inside the hall, so I can't attest to whether that complaint is true or not. It may well be. If so though, some thoughts:

That was not the debate I expected at all.

I expected a debate that featured a war between Gingrich's intellect and his instincts. Gingrich would try to act the front-runner, to play it cool, to refrain from outbursts.

At Investors.com, the always interesting Jed Graham reminds us that back in 2007, Romney economist Greg Mankiw's criticized the carried interest rule that allows Mitt Romney to pay 15% on his earnings at Bain:

Krugman hit the nail on the head with this question: ‘why does (private equity titan) Henry Kravis pay a lower tax rate on his management fees than I pay on my book royalties?’ The analogy is a good one. In both cases, a person (investment manager, author) is putting in effort today for a risky return at some point in the future. The tax treatment should be the same in the two cases.

Politico rounds up the sudden right-of-center media drop on Gingrich, including this line from Ann Coulter:

“Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.”

George Soros's op-ed in today's Financial Times offering an alternative plan to save the Euro:

My proposal is to use the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Stability Mechanism to insure the ECB against the solvency risk on any newly issued Italian or Spanish treasury bills they may buy from commercial banks. This would allow the European Banking Authority to treat the T-bills as the equivalent of cash, since they could be sold to the ECB at any time. Banks would then find it advantageous to hold their surplus liquidity in the form of T-bills as long as these bills yielded more than bank deposits held at the ECB. Italy and Spain would then be able to refinance their debt at close to the deposit rate of the ECB, which is currently 1 per cent on mandatory reserves and 25 basis points on excess reserve accounts. This would greatly improve the sustainability of their debt. Italy, for instance, would see its average cost of borrowing decline rather than increase from the current 4.3 per cent. Confidence would gradually return, yields on outstanding bonds would decline, banks would no longer be penalised for owning Italian government bonds and Italy would regain market access at more reasonable interest rates.

In a column in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens lamented that the Republican Party deserved to lose the 2012 election. A special target of Stephens' wrath was Mitt Romney, whom Stephens dismissed as a hollow man without conviction.

I wrote this in reply:

Today on Morning Edition, NPR aired my interview with Steve Inskeep. I discussed Gingrich's ability to tap into voter anger and Romney's prescriptions for that anger. You can hear the whole interview here.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is a great historian of American politics, first a fine biography of Kingman Brewster's circle of postwar liberal Republicans and now an even more ambitious book, a history of the decline of moderate Republicanism as a political force since the 1950s. The book was recently reviewed at length and favorably on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

Rule and Ruin is a book in which I take special pleasure, since some of the individual profiles in the book began as blogposts on the FrumForum site. It's an especially timely book now, when so many Republicans seem gripped by a 1964 style urge to hurl themselves over a cliff to make a point. Geoff's insights and analysis offer both warning and hope.

So here's the link to my interview with Peter Schiff on Tuesday. For those who don't know, Peter Schiff is a financial manager turned radio host. He's famous for having denounced the housing boom of the 2000s as a bubble and for his ultra-hard-money views.

Probably the most interesting part of the interview, should you listen to it, comes in the second half. I make the point that it's unexpected for gold and US Treasuries to rise together—and that one of those price rises is likely to end in tears. I suggest that it is more likely to be gold on grounds that (1) gold is a much smaller market, with fewer players and more easily manipulated and that (2) it's a market much more characterized by the kind of unethical and/or abusive practices we saw, for example, in the subprime market.