You may as well try to fly. 

It’s Newtonium, my brothers and sisters. Only not. Gingrich is a place-holder protest candidate of radicalized GOP base formations against a compromised GOP establishment embodied in the person of Willard Mitt Romney. Gingrich is the lint sucked whole and entire into the vacuum of power left by the collapse of the centre-right in the form of the Tea Party movement. Writes Mike Allen of POLITICO.com in a story titled Why Newt’s surge is for real:

[...] He would be my top choice at the moment in terms of the full package — ideas and positions and ability to beat Obama in 2012,” said a top Christian organizer. “Gingrich might not be as conservative as we like on every issue, and he may have had different opinions over the decade. But he still doesn’t attain the level of Romney in seeming lack of sincerity and authenticity” [...]

In other words, he’s NOT-Romney.

yours, &c.
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[Willard Mitt Romney's] Hopes for wrapping up the nomination with a quick-strike victory, which would require a strong showing in Iowa, are fading, write Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman and Reid J. Epstein for POLITICO.com in a story titled Gingrich surge prompts Romney reboot

Martin, Haberman, and Epstein continue:

Romney’s comments effectively marked a public concession that the play-it-safe approach he’s held to so far this year – limiting his interviews and doing only modest amounts of retail campaigning – simply won’t cut it anymore [...]

The stealth-campaign that amounts to an anti-campaign is the solution to voter intensity problem:

[...] Romney’s advisers long ago digested the absence of love for Romney among Republican voters and constructed a campaign designed to win in spite of that problem rather than trying to do something about it, writes Dan Balz in a Washington Post story titled Can Romney prevail if few are excited about him?

Their theory is that voters are not looking for inspiration or empathy so much as they want someone with the experience to turn around the economy. They may believe, with some justification, that in a choice between Romney and Gingrich, Republican voters will see Romney as the safer and better bet.

They may turn to surrogates like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to provide the charisma and excitement lacking in their candidate. Ultimately, they will sell Romney as the most electable candidate to the rank and file, who find little else to inspire them about him. But Romney’s challenge will be to make that sale more effectively than he’s done so far.

Republican leaders are counting on anti-Obama sentiment to keep the enthusiasm gap tilted in their favor next year, regardless of the limitations of their own nominee. Perhaps they are correct. But if they end up with a candidate that even many of their own voters see as not someone who walks among them and for whom they feel so little passion, that intensity gap may be perilously small [...]

The true risk of Romney’s anti-campaign is not just low intensity in the form of commitment but actual resentment. Back to Martin, Haberman, and Epstein of POLITICO.com:

[...] Alex Castellanos, the veteran strategist who worked for Romney in his 2007 race but is neutral now, said that such a raise-the-drawbridge approach has hurt Romney.

“Romney has yet to demonstrate character, to tell us who he is, or what he’s willing to fight for, other than something he got wrong, his health care law — and even his commitment to that, at times, seems more like a calculated attempt to display political courage, than a hill he would fight and die on,” he said.

“I wish he would run a campaign. Everybody who runs for president should. Weakness is never a good strategy. Weakness attracts wolves,” Castellanos said. “I fear Romney is putting voters in a terrible spot. He’s not really competing for their votes. He’s just allowing his competitors to fail. Some Republicans, I fear, see that as the Romney campaign rubbing his inevitability in their face, telling them, ‘You have no choice but me.’ That builds a lot of resentment in the pressure cooker” [...]

Romney proposes not to develop a coalition of interest in support of his nomination but to disable other candidates. Hence his is not a campaign so much as an anti-campaign by an anti-candidate with no natural base, neither regional since he can carry the one state that he was once said to govern, nor ideological since the two principal political formations of the GOP activist base—the Tea Partiers and social conservatives—reject the premises of a Romney nomination: Gingrich Does Better Among Conservative Republicans and Tea Party Supporters, says Gallup in a blog burst titled Gingrich 37%, Romney 22% Among GOP Voters Nationwide

Only a month before the Iowa caucus itself does the former corporate raider realize the error of the assumptions of his non-strategy. Go Mitt! And by go I mean depart into the ignominy of complete obscurity.

yours &c.
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Romney tells Baier his interview was overly aggressive:

Romney-Baier interview part 1

Commentary:

At about 2.00 Baier cites videos of Romney taking contradictory positions. At about 2.20 Romney tells Baier that he can read his book to discover his convictions about the issues. Only Romney edited his own book when it was released in soft-cover to remove a line about national healthcare reform.

At about 3.15 Romney infers that criticism of his ideological cross-dressing is the result of “Democratic ads breaking through” or something.

At about 3.41  Romney issues a claim about Bush 43′s position on abortion: Romney repeats GWB abortion claim he walked back in ’07.

At about 3.46 Baier broaches immigration. Here is the article he references: Romney in 2006 Backed Immigration Stance He Now Deems ‘Amnesty’.

At about 6.56 Baier asks if Romney still supports the idea of a mandate. Romney responds by scolding Baire: “Brett, I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve said this too—this is an unusual interview—Romney then breaks into a laugh both terrified and mirthless as he visibly squirms in his seat and crosses his legs into a defensive posture.

At about 7.15 Romney issues casuistry to support the claim that the mandate to purchase insurance was right for Massachusetts yet not for the nation. There are other points of view on this issue: Romneycare architect: Romney is ‘just lying’.

Romney-Baier interview part 2

Commentary:

This excerpt begins on healthcare. Romney claims that he is the best position to argue the issue. Others disagree: Limbaugh: Obama wants to run against Romney so Obamacare will be off the table.

At 4.35 Romney claims to be reading Decision Points by former President Bush. In a Politico.com Burns and Haberman blog burst titled So Nice, Read it Twice?, Maggie Haberman comments by a way of the quote of a “Democratic strategist”:

[...] The strategist seized on it as a way to reverse the flip-flop narrative and saying “after a rough few weeks of flip-flopping all over the place…his handlers must have told him today that he can’t change his positions on a daily basis. He must have taken their advice a little too literally, because today when asked what book he just read he had the same answer from seven months ago. If Mitt Romney hasn’t read a book lately, he should just come out and say it. Romney demonstrated once again that he’s incapable of being truthful about issues large and small” [...]

Romney announced that he had finished Decision Points 7 months ago:

[...] Back in May, in an NBC News interview, Romney said, “Last book I read was a novel called The Rule Of Nines, which was just fun…a more serious book, I finished President Bush’s book, ‘Decisions,’ and enjoyed that very much” [...]

Another issue about Romney’s choices in reading material:

Asked what book he’s read most recently, Romney said, “I’m reading sort of a fun one right now, so I’ll skip that,” adding, “I just read ‘Decision Points’ by President Bush,” writes Tommy Christopher for www.mediaite.com in a column titled Mitt Romney Refuses To Tell Bret Baier What ‘Fun Book’ He’s Reading

Christopher continues:

This begs the obvious question of what could be more embarrassing that reading a George W. Bush tome. Is he reading the scratch ‘n sniff edition of Snooki‘s A Shore Thing?

Romney has taken some ribbing in the past over his reading choices. Some websites needled him earlier this year over his admission that he’s a big Twilight fan, almost exactly four years after he took grief for telling Fox News that his favorite novel was Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard‘s Battlefield Earth. (Romney was careful to add that he was “not in favor of his religion by any means.”)

The “what do you read” question has tripped up many a candidate, but it’s not as if Romney said he was getting his news from Hubbard or Team Edward. While we may kid candidates about stuff like this, Romney’s affinity for crap shouldn’t matter at all to voters, or anyone else. In fact, as a guy who loves to chair dance to the Lil Mama remix of Avril Lavigne‘s Girlfriend in the car, and doesn’t care who knows it, I find Romney’s willingness to admit the embarrassing somewhat endearing [...]

yours &c.
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At first blush, a poll showing Mitt Romney trailing Newt Gingrich among likely Iowa caucus goers shouldn’t be too worrying for the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign. There’s been a steady ebb and flow of chief competitors this fall and, although Romney recently started investing heavily in the state he long ignored, Iowa was never going to be the battleground on which Romney’s candidacy won or died. But the internals of a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing Gingrich with a robust lead hint at a potentially broader problem: Voters there simply haven’t been buying what he’s been selling, writes Adam Sorenson in a Time magazine Swampland post titled Romney’s Message Not Taking Root in Iowa

Romney had earlier ceded the state only to discover that without it he could lose New Hampshire.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign has been worried about Iowa from the beginning. The Hawkeye State cost Romney real blood and treasure in his 2008 bid, and his team was wary of trying again after it became obvious his ceiling was so low, writes Reid Wilson in a National Journal 2012 Decoded blog burst titled The Last Temptation of [Willard] Mitt [Romney].

Wilson continues:

[...] But if Romney’s ceiling is somewhere around 25 percent, he might want to revisit that initial skepticism. All indications are that Newt Gingrich is uniting a significant portion of the Republican electorate; an ABC News/Washington Post poll out today shows Gingrich at 33 percent among likely caucus-goers, while Romney and Rep. Ron Paul are tied at 18 percent. That’s a bigger lead than Gingrich enjoyed in a Des Moines Register poll (Gingrich 25 percent, Paul 18, Romney 16) and an NBC News/Marist poll (Gingrich 26, Romney 18, Paul 17) released over the weekend [...]

yours &c.
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[...] The cleanup of records by Romney’s staff before his term ended included spending $205,000 for a three-year lease on new computers for the governor’s office, according to official documents and state officials, writes Mark Hosenball in a Reuters release titled Romney staff spent nearly $100,000 to hide records

What is in the hole? 

Hosenball continues:

In signing the lease, Romney aides broke an earlier three-year lease that provided the same number of computers for about half the cost – $108,000. Lease documents obtained by Reuters under the state’s freedom of information law indicate that the broken lease still had 18 months to run. 

As a result of the change in leases, the cost to the state for computers in the governor’s office was an additional $97,000 [...]

The emphasis is mine. All mine.

Is The Fate Of Mitt Romney’s Presidential Campaign In The Hands Of A Reuters FOIA Request?, asks Brian Paul in a Zero Hedge blog comment on the Reuters release.

yours &c.
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Meanwhile, at Team Romney headquarters … 

Stokols continues:

The news has to concern Romney, who easily defeated John McCain in Colorado’s 2008 presidential caucus and has long looked at this interior west state as friendly terrain [...]

yours &c.
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[...] The Romney team’s MO has been to pursue softball coverage in lieu of potentially dangerous interviews. He agreed to interviews with soft-lens magazines like Parade and People, but not with newsmagazines or websites, or even with The Boston Globe reporters who are writing a biography of the candidate. He has avoided The New York Times as well, and his only policy-oriented interview — foreign policy, exclusively — with The Washington Post was granted to blogger Jennifer Rubin, who holds similar views, writes Dylan Byers of POLITICO.com in a story titled Mitt’s media blowback

Byers continues:

Romney also avoids reporters’ questions on the trail. When confronted by a Times reporter about this, he countered that he had press avails “almost every day” — a preposterous stretch of the word “almost.” (In fact, the reporter noted, Romney’s most recent press avail had been nearly a week earlier.)

While tight message control has often made it seem as though he is on a glide path to the nomination, the fallout from the Baier interview also signaled that a backlash is always close [...]

yours &c.
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Here be the numbers of Occupy Wall Street protesters by location as reported by the Washington Post in the form of a table.

Caption: Lost in the crowd. 

4,000 participants—and I am rounding up—falls somewhat short of the 20,000 participants that this animated Guy Fawkes mask calls for to avenge its brothers and sisters who suffered miserably at the hands of New York City police:

Yet despite the tiny footprint of this astro-turfed non-event the national media and now an alienated and estranged U.S. President grasp at the spectacle of the spectacle of a mock-“occupation” as it confirms the progressive fantasy-narrative of a popular uprising against the rich in the interests of the state (for some reason). Here is some guy named Ted Essig’s version of the story of populist class-rage interpreted, strangely, as a gesture of inclusion:

[…] In other words, we’re in a real mess with lots of reasons to be upset. No differences there. The differences between the Tea Party position and that of Occupy Wall Street emerge in how that upset is expressed, in how solutions are sought. If we think of the Tea Party starting with a rebel’s yell of “get your f-in hands off my f-in stuff” then OWS begins with a naive complaint about being hungry while others unfairly have too much, “how much stuff do you really need, really, to have a good life?” […]

Essig conflates the notion of “inclusion” on grounds of class, race, gender, creed, or other criteria, with the demand that others surrender more of their “stuff” because they don’t really need it or something. This is also our President’s message as reported by Zeke Miller in a Business Insider story titled White House Draws Closer To Occupy Wall Street, Says Obama Is Fighting For The Interests Of The 99%:

[…] Earnest added that while on the trip, Obama will make it clear that he is fighting to make certain that the “interests of 99 percent of Americans are well represented” — the first time the White House has used the term to differentiate the vast majority of Americans from the wealthy […]

This would be hysterically funny if it weren’t so sad.

yours &c.
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To use a humble agrarian metaphor, imagine you sowed seed that performed at a 1 to 1 ratio, 1 seed given for 1 seed planted, or even a 1 to 2 ratio. At this level of productivity you would starve, because your stock would diminish with each cycle as you consumed or traded some of it. It is the surplus production–or relatively high productivity–of cereal grains that permits sedentary agriculture to persist. Coda: Our capital stock and labour investment in the aggregate now returns a declining yield, which is what a declining productivity means. Hence, we’re starving, a starvation that takes the form of an economy in a free fall.

This isn’t economic principle at stake; this is an immutable law of physics.

Caption: Desolation is the new black.

Discussion points:

1.

Second quarter productivity was revised down to a decline of 0.7%, the biggest drop since the fourth quarter of 2008, from a first reading of -0.3%. It has fallen for two quarters in a row, for the first time since the end of 2008, writes the estimable Mark Gongloff in a Wall Street Journal “Market Beat” blog blog burst titled Jobless Claims Stuck Above 400,000, Productivity Falls

Some might say that falling productivity, which is output per worker hour, could be good if it means businesses are going to hire more people. But falling productivity is really hard to spin as great news. It’s bad for living standards, raises inflation risks and hurts corporate profits [...]

2.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Worker productivity in the United States fell this spring more quickly than previously estimated while labor costs were rising at a faster clip. Both developments could pose threats to a fragile economic recovery, writes Associated Press Economics Writer Martin Crutsinger in a story titled US productivity falls in spring, labor costs rise

The U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday that productivity declined at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the April-June period, a bigger drop than the 0.3 percent decline reported a month ago. Labor costs rose at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, faster than the 2.4 percent increase originally reported [...]

3.

Meanwhile, the Obama Interregnum enters a tragically comic new phase as the U.S. President expresses prophetically his “frustration” with his powerlessness to move the U.S. Congress in advance of presidential-level political performance art where Mr. Obama announces a call for so-called jobs legislation only to blame a divided Congress for failing to deliver it to his desk for a signature.

Update in the form of a mixed signal: Despite Mr. Obama’s signed email message to his supporters where he announces that he will demand that Congress act even as he asserts his own non-agency when he concedes that whether they act is their own prerogative, news is developing that he now intends to “go it alone” and use federal agencies under his direct control to initiate infrastructure projects: Obama Rolls Out a Jobs Plan That Doesn’t Need Congress.

We’re making this up as we go along, my brothers and sisters. There is no centre here. No one is in charge.

yours &c.
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[…] The study, called “Cultures of the Tea Party,” also claims voters who felt favorably toward the tea party movement valued deference to authority and libertarianism, writes Christina Silva of the Associated Press in a chron.com story titled Researcher says tea party voters fear change

Silva continues:

The report concludes that the tea party movement is not a new political phenomenon, but rather “is best understood as a new cultural expression of the late-20th-century Republican Party” […]

Libertarian-authoritarian change-fearing anarchists?

Why, yes, that makes perfect sense. This is one of those “studies” that reveals more about the researcher than about the object of the researcher’s inquiry.

yours &c.
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