Mitt Romney said that 47 % of the American public pay no income tax, so the low-tax argument would not resonate with them; they would vote for Obama anyway. Romney told the donors that his strategy was to reach the independents, who had presumably paid income tax.

One thing that I have not seen in the press yet is that Romney's statement was either profoundly misleading or profoundly ill-informed.

• First, speaking as someone who pays over 10 % of my income in income tax, and as someone definitely moonbat, and belonging to a large class of income-tax-paying moonbats (whose existence is decried almost hourly by talk radio), Romney's opposition includes people who pay income tax.
• Second, many of the 47 % who do not pay income tax support Romney. Some support him because they support the GOP's position on social issues. Some support him because they believe that the wealthy elite will lead us out of recession if taxes are low; some even support him because they empathize with the wealthy elite. Some support him because - and let's be honest about this - Romney has the correct skin color.
• Third, all of that 47 % pay taxes; in fact some of them pay a greater percentage of their income to taxes than Romney does. Most taxes - sales taxes, excise taxes, tarriffs, etc. - fall on all consumers, and as the 47 % spend more of their income on daily needs, a greater proportion of their income goes to the various tax men. (And do I have to observe that FICA - for social security - falls most heavily on those with the lowest income?)

As American embassies burned, Governor Romney had another attack of foot-in-mouth disease. Readers who remember Romney's criticism of London's preparation for the Olympics and his cultural critique of Palestinians might not have been surprised by Romney's complaint that President Obama's reaction to the riots in Egypt, Libya and Yemen were insufficiently muscular. But even if a more muscular reaction would improve matters (and in the aftermath of our Iraqi adventure, that's not that clear), the indiscretion suggested that Romney may not be ready for a job that requires a judicious tongue. It didn't help that some of what he said was incorrect.

One good reason for caution showed up in the unfolding federal investigation of The Innocence of Muslims, whose production and promotion increasingly resembles a Joseph Conrad novel. According to one recent account, a group of Egpytian emigres used a charity - perhaps without that charity's knowledge - as a front for producing a home-made film, in coordination with a known Right wing parvenu acting as a "script consultant". Some of the more excitable Middle Eastern pundits saw a CIA plot, but it was far more likely that this Conradesque crowd was acting on its own (although afficionados of black byzantine comedy can easily imagine one of the more extreme Islamic groups beguiling extreme Christians in American into producing this video).

Since just about anything could lie at the bottom of this - down to and including an advertizing firm out to make a splash (yes, such firms have conducted such stunts in the past) - pundits would be wise to be cautious in their analyses.

Walter Karp was one of the old grumps of the Left, and the thesis of Indispensable Enemies was that the Democratic and Republican parties used each other as foils to keep each other in power. (Yes, Karp claimed that the parties were in power, not the corporations: he observed that tribute is paid by the vassal to the liege.) This kind of observation is not new; in fact, the spectacle of two "extremes" acting in virtual collusion against the "middle" is as old as the Nazi-Soviet alliance.

Usually, the collusion is only virtual: there is little evidence of collusion between GOP Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini in an October Surprise conspiracy against President Jimmy Carter; on the other hand, both Reagan's and Khomeini's strategists could read each other fairly well, and both regarded Carter as their ... mutual ... enemy, and both were will to play a game without any overt acts.

One recent recurrent manifestation of this indispensable enemies phenomenon is the following scenerio. Relatively obscure westerner makes self-promotional move by insulting some aspect of Islam, relatively obscure Muslim makes a self-promotional move by denouncing said westerner, excitable people go on the rampage, and pundits pontificate - thus promoting the fellows who started the merry-go-round. The pattern was set by Khomeini's stunt in pursuing Salman Rushdie. Rushdie had not been obscure, and had other motives in writing The Satanic Verses, but after the affair, lesser lights would see this as a road to fame. Lesser lights like ... Gainesville preacher Terry Jones and Egyptian TV host Sheikh Khaled Abdalla (alas, only # 4 out of five).

Jones is pure mountebank. Before burning a copy of the Qu'ran ( with cameras rolling, of course), he was leading his flock to demonstrate their contempt of dead US servicemen -- during their funerals (increasingly performing to a hostile audience). So when a dubious independent film (of uncertain provenance) on the Innocence of Muslims came to his attention, he couldn't resist. Now where is the nearest TV camera?

It takes two to play this game, but never fear, someone must have been keeping an eye on Jones just in case opportunity strikes, and by some coincidence, Abdalla was exposing the latest western insult within hours of it being posted on You-Tube - just in time (amazing coincidence!) for a September 11 protest.

For Jones and Abdalla, the resulting carnage must be very satisfying. Indeed, Jones got a call from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking if Mr. Jones would please issue a clarifying statement. Heady stuff. For Abdalla, the Egyptian government's prize punt is probably a reward in itself.

Meanwhile, as pundits pontificate about how Christians never (never? hardly ever!) behave this way, grownups surveying the wreckage can only wonder what stunt the mountebanks will try next.

The quote of the campaign appears to be Republican pollster Neil Newhouse's gaffe,

We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.

Both the Tampa Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times ran Sunday op-eds on lying in campaigns, both citing Russell Hardin's The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism (pp. 3 - 22 in Political Extremism and Rationality, edited by Albert Breton, Gianluigi Galeotti, Pierre Salmon, and Ronald Wintrobe, published in 2002).

Hardin presented a theory of economic epistemology, based on the idea that information has costs; in particular, keeping up with politics requires time and effort. Some people will simply rely on the people around them and the sources at hand, with the result that some groups will simply grow insular, close-minded and unwilling to compromise with reality. This is not a new observation (see Wikipedia's article on Groupthink), and moreover Hardin (perhaps for reasons of space) did not go into the use of extreme positions as shibboleths, i.e., as mechanisms for determining membership in the group ...

• For many years, "centrist" pro-life Democrats have complained that their failure to support pro-Choice positions froze them out of party functions. The pro-choice position has become a Democratic shibboleth.
• Meanwhile, Grover Norquist has made tax cuts into a Republican shibboleth, so much so that any Republican straying from Norquist's position is labeled a "Republican In Name Oonly.

• Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Cass Sunstein wrote that "... extremists listen only to one another. They live in self-reinforcing information cocoons.".
• Tampa Bay Times Editor wrote of the flood of lies in this campaign, and quoted Jack Shafer of Reuters saying "I suppose fact-checking would matter more to voters if they expected honesty from their politicians ... But most don't. ... Voters crave rhetoric that stirs their unfact-checked hearts. As long as the deception is honest, pointing in the direction they want to go, they're all right with it.".

• David Warner let several colleagues weigh in on Arianna Huffington and sleep deprivation, recalling Barry Goldwater's support for Planned Parenthood, and doctors walking for health reform. And a silly creature named Erin Gloria Ryan said that Tampa reminded her of "a smaller and less douchey Miami", which is bizarre since the back lots of Tampa is nothing like the City-That-Cocaine-Built-by-the-Sea.
• Mitch Perry said that 'Tampa's RNC was a once in a lifetime experience', which is what Tampa Host Committee Chairman Ken Jones said -- many times. Meanwhile, Danielle Villarreal (from, ahem, Chicago) suggested that like NASCAR racers, politicians should wear all the logos of their sponsors.
• And David Warner emerged to describe the thrills and disappointments of hosting the biggest bash ever, including the failure of delegates to flock to local restaurants, the failure of journalists to flock to local tourist traps, and the failure of police to arrest lots of protesters, which probably disappointed fitness fanatics in the NYPD.

Wikipedia gives Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe credit for the notion of a pecking order -- and yes, he observed it in birds. Of course, it's been observed in many other animals as well, including primates, where groups of youngsters establish "dominance hierarchies"; since mothers support their offspring, dominant parents are prone to have dominant children. As for how these juvenile dominance hierarchies are established, well, a lot of that comes under what naive observers call play ...

We are primates, so we should not be surprised if our more defenseless juveniles get a disproportionate amount of biting and scratching, as the New York Times reported in School Bullies Prey on Children With Autism.

Recent research suggests that people shoved down dominance hierarchies -- like other primates shoved down dominance hierarchies -- are more prone to stress and depression induced disorders. So we probably shouldn't take the traditional view that this is play, for play is a mechanism for exploring the world, while bullying is a mechanism for dealing with people in it. Of course, the traditionalists are right when they say that bullying is natural (other primates do it), but as Katherine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen , "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above."

In light of the Pentagon's growing concern about the national security implications of climate change, the Republican Platform's dismissal of climate change in a rant on "A Failed National Security Strategy" (see page 40) is almost surreal.

Finally, the strategy subordinates our national security interests to environmental, energy, and international health issues, and elevates "climate change" to the level of a "severe threat" equivalent to foreign aggression.

No, the strategy does not "subordinate" our national security interests to "climate change" issues; it treats "climate change" as a threat comparable to foreign aggression. Here is the Democratic Platform (page 61):

The national security threat from climate change is real, urgent, and severe. The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe.

Of course, what this really suggests is that the Democratic Platform committee took its job more seriously than the Republican Platform committee.

Tomorrow the Democratic National Convention opens to the tune, We Take Labor For Granted Because They Have Nowhere Else to Go. But today is Labor Day, which started as a festival day in 1880s New York, became a state holiday of Oregon in 1887, and a federal holiday in 1894. Unions were rising and the courts were slowly shifting from their old view that unions were terrorist conspiracies aimed at upstanding capitalists. In fact, it wasn't long before presidential campaigns were officially launched on Labor Day (as opposed to the day after the Inauguration).

Perhaps it is appropriate that Google decided to make the American flag their logo for this Labor Day, for that was the era that the notorious Christian Socialist and flag manufacturer Francis Bellamy wrote Version 1 of the Pledge of Allegiance (what's recited nowadays is Version 5). Workers would take the flag with them to strikes, to demonstrate their allegiance -- and the contrary allegiance of hired muscle that factory owners would send in to break up the strike. And to this very day, when I go to the monthly meetings of the Central Labor Council, they start with (Version 5) of the pledge. Unions are as American as apple pie.

In some ways, Neil Armstrong's death weighs over the Republican National Convention even more heavily than Isaac. In fact, by discouraging protests and yet keeping its distance, Isaac may have been a gift to a party whose embrace of a "can't do" attitude makes the era of civil rights victories, detente and recognition of China, the Great Society and the environmental breakthroughs of the Nixon era, all seem more distant. Are Pat Oliphant and I the only ones who wonder what has happened to us?

Of course, back then the politics was just as bad: assassinations of leading liberal and progressive politicians, the Vietnam War was expanding, a president resigned in disgrace, and the files J. Edgar Hoover used to blackmail people disappeared: which was more embarrassing, the Republican National Convention of 1964 or the Democratic National Convention of 1968? And then as now, we had enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world umpteen times. Perhaps the more things change ...

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