Has Ann Coulter Finally Jumped The Shark?

She did for me last year at CPAC, of course, when she derided John Edwards as a “faggot”. At the time, a number of conservative bloggers wrote that she had embarrassed the movement and owed Edwards an apology, which she refused to offer. This year, the ACU has opted not to have her as a featured speaker, although I understand she will appear at an ancillary event at CPAC.
Of course, she can then explain why she will campaign for Hillary Clinton if John McCain wins the Republican nomination:

So let’s walk through the logic here. John McCain gets castigated by Coulter because he aligns himself too often with the Democrats. Her solution to that is — to campaign for the Democrats? Maybe someone can explain the thought process to me, but it sounds like a hysterical demand for extortion rather than a considered and thoughtful political position.
I’m supporting Mitt Romney because I think he is the better option. If Mitt doesn’t win the nomination, I plan to support John McCain. He will have won the support of more of the party, and that would make him the man to carry the banner. I will still oppose some of his policy stands and acknowledge his apparent animus at times to the party base, but he will still be a much better choice for the nation than Hillary Clinton.
It appears Coulter hates McCain more than she cares about conservative values. She has acquired McCain Derangement Syndrome, and is rather obviously unbalanced by it. Sean Hannity was clearly embarrassed to listen to this tirade, and Coulter should have been embarrassed to have indulged in it.
UPDATE: Thanks to Real Clear Politics for the link.
Some in the comments argue that Coulter didn’t actually call Edwards a faggot. Here’s the quote: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” It’s complete intellectual dishonesty to claim that this isn’t the same thing as publicly calling him that name. Any argument otherwise is a fraud. Don’t even pull that weak trash out here.

The Despicable Nature Of Our Enemy

Baghdad got hit by two bombers today, but neither of them committed suicide. The al-Qaeda attack involved strapping remote-controlled bombs to two girls with Down’s Syndrome, and detonating the devices when they walked through the market. The explosions killed 73 people in one of the deadliest days since the surge pacified most of Iraq:

Remote-controlled explosives strapped to two mentally retarded women detonated in a coordinated attack on Baghdad pet bazaars Friday, Iraqi officials said, killing at least 73 people in the deadliest day since the U.S. sent 30,000 extra troops to the capital last spring.
The chief Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, claimed the female bombers had Down syndrome and that the explosives were detonated by remote control, indicating they may not having been willing attackers in what could be a new method by suspected Sunni insurgents to subvert stepped up security measures.
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said the bombings showed that a resilient al-Qaida has “found a different, deadly way” to try to destabilize Iraq. … Involving women in fighting violates cultural taboos in Iraq, but the U.S. military has warned that al-Qaida in Iraq is recruiting females and youths to stage suicide attacks because militants are increasingly desperate to thwart stepped-up security measures.

If nothing else has shown the remarkable bloodthirstiness and heartlessness of the AQI terrorists, this should do it. People who would exploit the mentally handicapped as walking bombs have no sense of humanity, justice, or peace. They are, simply put, evil people who have no capacity for negotiation or co-existence.
In a way, this shows how desperate AQ has become. They obviously cannot fill their ranks with willing participants, and even hostages won’t suffice. Instead, they exploit the weakest and most innocent and use them as commodities to kill as many people as possible.
The Iraqis have seen this evil up close and have rejected it. They understand now that there is no accommodation with evil. It has to be defeated, and defeated utterly.

Mitt Romney Conference Call

This morning, Mitt Romney held a New Media conference call to discuss the state of the race and his strategy for the Super Tuesday primaries. This is the first one of these I recall from the Romney campaign, and I hope that it won’t be the last.
Romney started off by saying that “it’s fun to watch the Democratic race,” noting that the national media hasn’t called it a done deal despite having one candidate who won twice as many as the other. He and McCain have essentially tied for states, and yet the media has tried to call the GOP contest a done deal. He also mentioned the “false claim” that he had supported a troop withdrawal from Iraq. Romney also sees Mike Huckabee as drawing some votes away from Romney.
Romney cast the election, in part, as a struggle for the Republican soul. He drew a comparison to 1976, when Ronald Reagan challenged insider Gerald Ford. The insider won the nomination and lost the election. Romney says that McCain represents “the quintessential Washington insider” who has too many existing ties to make a difference as President.
Romney said he would “repeal McCain-Feingold if I could”. He also would fight against McCain-Kennedy, and oppose McCain-Lieberman, with its 50-cent-per-gallon burden on drivers and the energy costs it will produce. He declares the unilateral imposition of energy controls would drive jobs overseas at an even greater rate.
Questions:
* Why the delay to buy ads for Tuesday? – Needed 24 hours to determine the best use of money after Giuliani’s withdrawal and endorsement of McCain. Some part of the buy would be national, but the state and local buys depended on how the politics had shifted.
* Will anything be decided on Tuesday, and in what states do you see your strength? – He thinks it’s possible that nothing will get decided at all. California looks good, and some winner-take-all states look pretty good too. Proportional states could at least gain delegates. He is “pleasantly surprised” that leading lights in the conservative movement — like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity — understand the defining moment. He thinks talk radio will continue to get underestimated by the national media. He’s proud of the support he gets from conservative talk radio.
* How is McCain remaining competitive with economic-first voters? — He leaves it to us to explain that. In Florida, it may have been the Crist endorsement. There may be more correlation than causation in this data. He still thinks his strength lies in his experience in the economy, and that McCain’s admission that he has a weakness in this area will hurt him. McCain’s response about punishing Wall Street during the debate “proves he does not” understand the economy, as does McCain-Lieberman.
* Wasn’t Romney inconsistent on chastising McCain for voting against the Medicare Part D expansion? – Romney says that he would have joined McCain on that vote, because it didn’t include an overall reform of Medicare. He will make sure that he clarifies that in the future.
* What comes after Iraq in the war on terror? – We will continue to see these eruptions in the Middle East until we get terrorism under control. We need to move far more aggressively on getting NATO involved in the entire GWOT. Romney would expand the intelligence and advisor units of special-ops forces. He reminds everyone that McCain’s accusation was “completely discredited”.
Anaysis: Romney handled himself well in this briefing. When Philip Klein noted the contradiction on Medicare Part D, Romney didn’t try evading it or spinning it. He said that he apparently was incorrect, that he would have voted with McCain on Part D, and that he would ensure that it didn’t happen again. That alone was pretty refreshing.
Romney sounded upbeat but realistic. He understands that he has an uphill battle on Tuesday thanks to the Florida loss, but doesn’t think the sky has fallen. He has made a careful use of his organizational and funding strength to try to aim surgically at getting the most of both on February 5th and the contests beyond. I’d call the tone guardedly optimistic, but he sounded ready to fight for this nomination.

AOL Hot Seat Show Today!

Listen to AOL Hot Seat on internet talk radio
AOL and BlogTalkRadio have partnered on the Hot Seat poll, extending the debate to our listenership. I will host a 15-minute show weekdays at 1:00 pm ET to review the poll, interview the blogger, and take calls from the participants. We’ll speak to a wide spectrum of bloggers and callers alike for each day’s poll — including today’s:

John Amato from Crooks & Liars will join me today to discuss the question and the results, so be sure to tune in at BlogTalkRadio — and don’t forget to cast your votes! We will also take your calls at (347) 205-9555.

Payroll Levels Drop In January

For the first time since August 2003, payroll levels decreased in the US in January. The loss of 17,000 jobs did not increase the unemployment rate, which remained at 4.9%, but it sends a signal to the economic markets that trouble still brews on the horizon:

Nervous employers cut 17,000 jobs in January — the first such reduction in more than four years and a fresh trouble sign that the economy is in danger of stalling.
The Labor Department’s report, released Friday, also showed that the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 4.9 percent, from 5 percent, as the civilian labor force shrank slightly.
Job losses were widespread. Manufacturers, construction firms and a variety of professional and business services eliminated jobs in January — reflecting the toll of the housing and credit debacles. The government cut jobs, too. All those cuts swamped job gains in education, health care, retailing and elsewhere.
Wage growth also slowed, another indication that employers are tightening their belts amid the economic slowdown.

The shrink in the civilian work force could have come from a number of sources. Perhaps the attrition of illegal workers has left the workforce smaller than expected. It could also be older boomers moving out of the group faster than expected. The former would also tend to reduce jobs as consumers decline in specific areas.
However, the bottom line is that our economy needs to add somewhere between 50,000 – 100,000 jobs a month to keep up with our population growth, and anything less eventually starts moving us backwards. Now we have crossed a Rubicon of sorts by seeing negative numbers in jobs for the first time in 53 months. The economic markets will see that, rightly, as a sign of continuing weakness in the economy, despite employment gains in most industries outside of residential housing and associated lending.
Expect to see the markets take a moderate hit today. The big question will be whether the Fed will wait six weeks until its next meeting to take any further action.

The McCain Disconnects

Matt Welch of Reason notices a strange phenomenon in primary voting this year, one that seems highly counterintuitive. I had noticed this in New Hampshire as well, and the trend has continued. John McCain, despite his championing of the Iraq war, continues to draw pluralities in self-professed anti-war voters:

It’s no mystery why independents gravitate toward McCain. He’s a country-first, party-second kind of guy who speaks bluntly and delights in poking fellow Republicans in the eye on issues such as campaign finance reform and global warming.
But there’s a bizarre disconnect in the warm embrace between McCain and the electorate’s mavericks. They hate the Iraq war, while he’s willing to fight it for another century. The most pro-war presidential candidate in a decade is winning the 2008 GOP nomination thanks to the antiwar vote.
A full 66% of independents think that the U.S. should completely withdraw from Iraq no later than 12 months from now, according to a Jan. 18-22 L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll. McCain, meanwhile, said last month that the U.S. might stay in Baghdad for another 100 years. He continually expresses bafflement at the idea that that might not be such a good thing. “It’s not the point! It’s not the point!” he snarled at reporters recently. “How long are we going to be in Korea?”
And yet he dominated the antiwar vote in New Hampshire, with 44% to Romney’s 19%, according to CNN exit polls. Ron Paul, the only actual antiwar Republican running, drew just 16% of voters who said they were against the war. The three finished in the same order among antiwar voters in Michigan, even though Romney won the state overall.

Welch, who backed anti-war candidate Ron Paul until recently (see update II below), laments the fact that anti-war voters ignored Paul. Plenty of reasons exist for voters to ignore Paul outside of the war, but it still calls into question the choice of McCain among these voters. Do they not understand his singular focus on fighting the war, or are they voting for McCain simply because he has told off Republicans more than he has Democrats?
In that vein, Mark Tapscott looks at a story from last March, regarding Tom Daschle’s claim that McCain wanted to negotiate a switch to the Democrats:

To put McCain in proper perspective, imagine if the mainstream media had been touting former Sen. Zell Miller as the Maverick to lead the Democratic party in 2004 because he demonstrated his independence by helping Bush and the GOP enact tax cuts, pass school vouchers and pack the Supreme Court with clones of Justice Clarence Thomas.

McCain has denied the story in The Hill, while John Edwards — who Daschle claims was part of the effort — confirms it. Both Daschle and Edwards have other motives in play, and it remains questionable whether the Democratic Party of 2001 would have welcomed a pro-life hawk when they could barely tolerate a liberal hawk like Joe Lieberman just a few years later. One has to wonder how McCain would have gotten re-elected in Arizona as a Democrat as well. (see update below)
However, McCain likes to antagonize his fellow Republicans a lot more than the Democrats, and Republicans have noticed it over the years. So have independents, and this appears to account for the strange anti-war attraction to McCain, the GOP’s biggest hawk in the race. For them, the war looks like a secondary issue to general opposition to the GOP and the Bush administration. McCain improbably has become the outsider candidate, and Romney the establishment candidate as a result.
After New Hampshire, Romney decided to go after the “Washington is Broken” theme hard. He seems to have realized the importance of being the outsider, while McCain has oddly doubled down on the war, as Welch notes. During the last debate, McCain kept arguing that Romney didn’t sufficiently support the war by not jumping immediately to the defense of the surge, but his singular focus on the war may wind up hurting him with the same people who have vaulted him into the position of being able to run it himself.
That will only work if the disconnects stay disconnected, which seems to be a very risky gamble for the general election. Will the anti-war factions who back McCain in the primary stick with him against Hillary Clinton or especially Barack Obama, or will the Democratic nominee give that faction an even better opportunity to stick their own finger in the eye of the GOP?
UPDATE: I forgot that I addressed this when it came out. I leaned towards it being nonsense then, and I still do.
UPDATE II: Matt Welch corrects me, in the comments; he never pledged his support to the Paul campaign. I hope he accepts my apology.

The Scaled-Down Expectations Of The Retreat Caucus

You have to hand it to the Democrats; they do surrender well. After coming out of their annual retreat last year with an ambitious agenda to force the White House into submission, the Congressional leadership managed to lose every major engagement with the supposedly lame-duck George Bush. This year, the term “annual retreat” took on new meaning:

A year ago, newly empowered House Democrats gathered here at the Kingsmill Resort for their annual retreat brimming with confidence. Before them was an ambitious legislative agenda and a determination to end or curtail the U.S. troop presence in Iraq.
This time around, the hotel and golf courses are the same, but the song is markedly different. Gone is the talk of forcing President Bush to end the war, as is the impetus to pass a comprehensive immigration package and to stick to strict budget rules. Instead, Democrats are thinking smaller, much smaller.
They hope to leave today with the beginnings of a scaled-down plan to pass a handful of bills in the House — even if they cannot get through the Senate — and build a case for November that Democrats have been productive enough to warrant at least another two years in the majority.

Last year, they left the retreat warning George Bush that they ran Washington in the wake of their midterm-election victory. Now they don’t even plan to get most of their bills out of Congress. Instead, their big plan — their strategy for demanding another two years in the majority — is a demonstration of futility by passing bills they can’t get through even a Democratic Senate.
This, according to the Democrats, demonstrates their productivity.
And what does appear on this year’s agenda? Opportunities for massive pork. They want a new energy bill, another transportation bill, and a reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. All of these give Democrats traditional opportunities to lard up in time for the election. Except for NCLB, they all give Bush a chance to wield his veto pen.
I had no idea that Kingsmill could be found over the event horizon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have pork barbecues on the agenda during the Congressional visit.

Dr. McCoy To The Sidelines, Please

Star Trek fans remember the tricorder, the handy medical and scientific device that allowed both Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock to make instant evaluations of injured crew members, hostile environments, and hurt Hortas. They were one of the ways in which plot lines could get speeded along without too much exposition, along with the “universal translator” that allowed everyone to speak in California English — well, everyone! except! William! Shatner!
In a development that ST fans might appreciate, sports physicians may be able to use something similar now to check for concussions. A new hand-held brain-scan device promises to make a clear diagnosis that will eliminate guesswork and prevent permanent damage:

A startup called BrainScope is developing a tool that may help inform doctors about which injured players should stay on the sidelines—or be taken to a hospital. The Chesterfield (Mo.) company’s handheld device determines the severity of concussions by reading the brain’s electrical signals. The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. is planning a clinical trial later this year. Ira Casson, co-chair of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, is eyeing the technology. “Today, you often have to use only your judgment” to gauge how serious a concussion is, Casson says. “If there were something more objective, that would be very useful.” …
The result was a tool that’s cheap and simple enough to be used on the sidelines. Rather than producing hard-to-decipher squiggly lines, the BrainScope device displays a meter, which shows whether brain activity after an injury falls in or out of the danger zone. Built-in signal-processing technology picks up abnormal brain signals, while simultaneously canceling out electrical noise from blinking, breathing, and the like. The device calculates the severity of each injury by comparing brain wave readings to a database of 15,000 scans compiled at New York University’s Brain Research Lab. “We’re going about it exactly the way many doctors told us to go about it,” says Causevic.
On Jan. 15, Causevic met with brain experts for the NCAA to design a pilot program. Before they roll out BrainScope, they’ll measure the brain activity of 750 high school and college players. That will provide an additional comparison to validate BrainScope’s accuracy after an on-field collision.

The device has applications outside of sports as well. If the price gets low enough, EMTs could carry this as a diagnostic device. Emergency rooms could use it in place of a more expensive EEG for triage. Most importantly, as Business Week notes, the military could use it in the wake of bomb attacks to determine whether troops need to be rotated out of combat assignments for recovery.
The technology still has to prove itself. It uses a scanning technique that has not had much validation in the past, despite 70 years of experimentation. The technique suffers from a reputation garnered by quacks using it for New Age enlightenment and for diagnostic purposes for which it was never intended or tested. BrainScope intends to provide the real-world test for the product that will prove the technology a boon or a bust in short order.
It’s not quite the tricorder that Star Trek predicted, but it’s a good start if it works. Does the device come with the lighted salt shaker accessory Dr. McCoy used, too?

Self-Funding In An Age Of BCRA

Late last night, Mitt Romney’s campaign released its fourth-quarter funding figures, and as everyone expected, Romney significantly self-funded. He raised $9 million, which stacks up well against the other Republicans, but added twice as much into the kitty from his own pocket. The Politico wonders how much he’s self-funding in January:

Mitt Romney contributed $18 million of his own money to his campaign in the fourth quarter, more than he had put in the first three quarters combined.
Romney also raised $9 million during the quarter and wound up with $2.43 million on hand. …
What is unknown is just how much Romney put in and spent during the month of January. Given the campaign’s heavy TV spending, his total personal contribution is likely now at $40 million or above.
John McCain raised $6.8 million for the quarter and was left with 2.9 million on hand at the end of December. But, in a reminder of his financial woes last year, he also had to take out a line of credit of $3 million and still carried a debt of $4.5 million.

This release occasioned an e-mail missive from Team McCain calling this “alarming”, and that he was “wasting his fortune”. Perhaps, but it is his fortune to waste — and given his track record, he’s probably not going to have much problem recovering it if he returns to the private sector now or a few years in the future. Whether a run for the Presidency is a “waste” really is Romney’s call, and no one else’s. After all, it’s his money.
It does point up a problem with all of the campaign-finance reform nonsense that Congress has imposed on the process. Money finds its way into the process no matter how many artificial barriers get imposed and artificial categories created for it. Americans express their support by their pocketbook — and they turn to other mechanisms when thwarted in efforts to directly support candidates. That accounts for the rise of 527s and their mostly-negative impact on national politics.
The BCRA and its predecessor acts have amplified the phenomenon of self-funders. They have always been around, but never quite like today. This year’s Congressional races will feature several of them in both parties, people who have to self-fund because of the advantages the BCRA gives to incumbents. Ned Lamont was the biggest example of this in 2006, someone selected to run against Joe Lieberman in the primary mostly for his ability to pay for the campaign himself.
And self-funders have one advantage that BCRA supporters originally espoused: they don’t owe lobbyists favors when they win. Having relied mainly on his own money, Romney can argue (and has) that anyone else’s contributions pale in comparison to those from his own family, and therefore no one holds IOUs in his administration. It actually shakes the lobbysists from influence, which is supposedly the entire point of the BCRA and other legislation like it.
Now the author of the BCRA wants to complain about running against a candidate who self-funds. John McCain can’t have it both ways. If he dislikes the wealthy who have to spend their own money to challenge the power system, then get rid of the Byzantine mess that his McCain-Feingold bill has created — and its attendant insults to the First Amendment. That’s what is truly “alarming” in politics.

Microsoft Looking For New Vistas

MIcrosoft apparently wants to bring all of the expertise they’ve displayed in their Vista operating system to the portal/search business on the Internet. They have launched a bid to buy Yahoo!, the original indispensable search engine and now multilayered service provider. It marks the most significant expansion attempt in years for Microsoft, and maybe their most aggressive bid ever:

Microsoft Corp. offered to buy search engine operator Yahoo Inc. for $44.6 billion in cash and stock in a move to boost its competitive edge in the online services market.
Microsoft bid $31 per share for Yahoo, representing a 62 percent premium to Yahoo’s closing stock price Thursday.

It looks like Microsoft may have given up on MSN. Microsoft launched their own search/portal site years ago, and tied their Windows Messenger IM product to it. It didn’t exactly catch on with web surfers, who preferred the sleeker search engines of first Yahoo and then Google. Never one to abide a market-share failure, the Redmond juggernaut now wants to buy its way to the top, or in this case, almost to the top. Even Microsoft probably can’t afford Google.
Vista users around the world probably all have the same thought — why not use that money to fix their latest operating system? From the annoying User Account Control functions to their buggy DNS system, users have begun migrating backwards in frustration. An important industry voice, Info World, has launched a petition drive demanding that Microsoft make XP available indefinitely, or at least until they have updated Vista to work with a wider range of existing peripherals and to function at a much higher competency level than users currently experience.
Of course, Microsoft could always claim that they can multitask and both fix Vista and integrate Yahoo into their organization. However, when any company spends $45 billion on an acquisition, their attention will rightly be spent on ensuring the cash flows that will legitimize the risk taken for the investment, and scant resources will go elsewhere in the short run. Vista users will get taken for granted, as they obviously were when the product got released.