Are Men an Appetite Suppressant?

Man or woman, it doesn’t matter. Whichever which gender you belong to, if you want to eat less, eat with a man. Link here.

That’s right. If you are eating with a real, live breathing manly man, you are naturally going to eat less.

A man eating with a man will eat less than he would if he were eating with a woman. A woman eating with a man will eat less than she would if she were dining with a woman.

One can only conclude that sisterhood makes you fat. Or, at the least, that it makes you eat more. Imagine that!

But, how can we possibly explain this socio-biological phenomenon?

Some believe that women are socialized to eat dainty portions when they are in the company of men. Perhaps this makes them look or feel more feminine, and thus, more attractive.

But, we might also say that a woman does not want to appear to have a ravenous appetite because her male companion might believe that she wants to eat him alive.

Despite rumors to the contrary, most men are not looking to be eaten alive for dessert.

Why then will a man who is eating with a woman eat more than when he is with another man?

Does he want to show her that he is hungry for her love? Does he want to show her that he has enough status and confidence to have a healthy appetite?

Do men know intuitively that higher status means less depressed and that less depressed means a better appetite.

But then again, how many women women are impressed by a gluttonous male stuffing his face throughout a romantic dinner.

Explaining this is not as easy as you think.

On the one hand, it appears that men, by their very being, are civilizing agents. Their manly presence causes all manner of humans to temper their appetites.

But, it might also be true that men have such bad table manners that their mere presence at a dinner functions as an appetite suppressant.

Watching a man pig out at dinner, chew with his mouth open, and dribble gravy onto his tie is enough to suppress anyone’s appetite.

Women Seeking Men

Women who are either looking for a partner or trying to take the temperature of a current relationship should pay very close attention to Susan Walsh’s valuable advice.

In a recent post on her blog Hooking Up Smart Walsh provides a checklist of the green lights that tell you to move forward. If those signs are absent you would do well to hesitate before getting more involved in a relationship.

The list is especially valuable because it will, when used properly, help women to overcome the tendency, engrained in our culture, to think that true love will solve everything.

If love is blind, Walsh’s list will hopefully open your eyes.

For those who believe that love, in and of itself, is all you need to have a great relationship I will share my own observation. The four scariest words I have ever heard from a woman are: “But I’m in love.”

Here’s a link to Walsh’s post. It is as good a set of relationship guidelines as I have ever seen.

Some Inconvenient Facts about Climate Change

One day, hopefully sooner than later, America will wake up and see that the “settled science” of climate change is specious.

Ginned up by environmental activists, promoted by that great scientist Al Gore, enshrined as dogma by the courts and regulators, climate change has very little to do with science.

I myself have no qualifications in the field, so I rely, as nearly all of us do, on the opinions of the scientific community.

At the very least, there is a division of opinion on the matter of climate change.

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal sixteen distinguished scientists signed an open letter to politicians.

They began:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

The scientists move on to present us with some inconvenient facts. The first is that for the past ten years there has been no global warming:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

And then there’s the matter of carbon dioxide. Ever since carbon dioxide was declared a pollutant, environmentalists and regulators have been doing their best to shut down industry and the energy grid.

What is the truth about carbon dioxide?  The scientists explain it so that even I can understand:

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Later on the scientists consider the policy implications that derive from the fact that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

Greenhouse gas controls stifle economic growth and make it more difficult for underdeveloped countries to emerge from poverty. They damage developing economies and produce more joblessness and poverty.

These are more things for environmentalists to feel proud of.

Primary Incivility

For some time now I have been commenting on the general nastiness that has enveloped the Republican nomination process. As I see it, the process if awash in negative emotion and incivility.

Victor Davis Hanson tries to move the warring parties toward comity by making it a no-fault situation. Tactically speaking, he can note that both Newt and Mitt are indulging in the same kind of negative campaigning, but, truthfully, Romney bears the greater part of the responsibility.

It does not make sense that a sane and sensible man like Mitt Romney would be leading a scorched earth campaign, but he is. And he should be held accountable.

Certainly, it’s not a winning strategy.

Hanson offers a cogent analysis, coupled with a warning:

But something about this particular spat seems nastier than, say, Romney–McCain or McCain–Bush (and remember, neither of those eventual nominees won the popular vote in the fall), or even Ford–Reagan and Reagan–Bush.  Romney supporters are not just for Mitt, but furiously seem to loathe Gingrich; Gingrich’s team equally seems to hate Romney. This is especially odd given that on the issues, there is very little actual difference between the two candidates at all (which might, counterintuitively, explain the animus: personal characteristics, style, comportment, class, and background instead are the main differences between the candidates, hence the clumsily dubbed “Tea Party vs. Country Club” rivalry).  

The question then arises whether, in the event Romney wins, Gingrich supporters will get out and support him, or, should Newt get the nomination, Romney people will fall into line. So many op-eds and TV ads are popping up so quickly that it almost seems impossible that any of these critics could ever endorse someone whom they have so thoroughly trashed in print or video — and whose line of argumentation will be drawn upon by Team Obama. At their worst, is not either Romney or Gingrich vastly preferable to Obama? I would think so.

Meanwhile, we are only vaguely aware that 2011 GDP growth did not even crack 2 percent, another puffed-up subsidized green company hit the dirt, and Obama climbs in the polls even as he should be having his worse quarter ever, given the debt, Keystone, recess appointments, and defense cuts. In military terms, strategy would be almost surreal: first, defeat and utterly humiliate a friendly rival, then expect to enlist what survives to form a new unified and harmonious army to defeat the heretofore untouched common enemy.

An Army of Mothers

If you haven’t see Sophie Robert’s film, The Wall, on the French way of treating autism, you had best hurry. (I linked the entirety of the movie on a previous post.)

Yesterday a court in Lille banned the movie from being shown in France. Or better, the court banned the movie in its current form. Had the producer been willing to censor her film, she might have been able to produce a version that would have been acceptable to the court.

And, No, it’s not pornography.

For now the YouTube link is still active.

In her movie Robert offered French psychoanalysts of all stripes a platform to express their views about autism. They seemed more than happy to do so.

All things considered, their words do not, in and of themselves, have very much interest. They manifest an advanced theoretical confusion, grown malignant from never having entered the international marketplace of ideas.

Initially, the film received a very narrow distribution. It mostly engaged people who were directly involved with autism. 

And then, almost miraculously, three of the psychoanalysts in the film, those of the strictest Lacanian persuasion, decided that the movie made them look bad. Suddenly, the story became worthy of the New York Times. See my prior post. (Of course, the analysts had all signed releases allowing their interviews to be part of the film.)

Naturally, they did not consider that they had made fools of themselves. They were more than happy to blame the filmmaker for their own inadequacies. In that they are good Freudians. If psychoanalysis does not teach you how to shift blame it has clearly failed in its primary task.

They did not pretend that they had not said that they said. They did not pretend that they did not believe what they said. They were seriously upset that the movie made them look bad.

So, they objected strenuously to the way their words had been edited.

You may know that I have had considerable experience with French psychoanalysts. In the past I have often witnessed their public lectures.

Trust me… they do not need anyone’s help when it comes to embarrassing themselves in public. They are masters of the game. Editing their public performances should count as an act of mercy.

In any case the aggrieved analysts sued Sophie Robert, demanding that she remove their statements and pay them monetary damages. That is, they were insisting that she censor her movie.

Yesterday, a judge in Lille accepted their claim, and awarded them damages. They had demanded $500,000, but were awarded $50,000.

The judge considered that the damage was so grave that she declared something of an emergency situation. Thus, she ordered that the film be suppressed immediately, that it not be shown on French television, as planned, and that the producer disburse the monetary award even before the decision could be appealed.

It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, for someone with no legal training and no knowledge of the French civil justice system to understand this verdict.

It is obvious enough, as Sophie Robert’s lawyer pointed out yesterday, that this decision would put an end to documentary filmmaking in France. It is fairly obvious that Michael Moore could never function under this regime. Nor could Evan Coyle Maloney, the producer of Indoctrinate U. Nor could very many journalists.

From what I understand it was based on a French law involving a subject’s “droit moral.” This complex legal concept seems to mean that a subject whose image or words are used in, for example, a documentary, has a legal recourse if the presentation makes him look bad and thus, damages is reputation.

To this outside observer, it suggests that the French have extremely thin skin. Now French psychoanalysts seem to have found a new calling as leaders of the army of the thin-skinned.

Of course, American journalists and legal scholars have long debated the question of editing an interview for journalistic presentation.

Journalists who routinely need to edit interviews have explained that if you run a literal transcript of someone’s remarks you often find that the person looks and sounds much worse than he would if his remarks had been edited.

As for the larger issue, that is, whether the editing presented the opinions of the French psychoanalysts correctly, I will offer my own opinion. I heard nothing in their presentations that seems in any way inconsistent with the dogmatic belief system that constitutes their pseudo-professional discourse. One of the analysts who filed suit has declared publicly that he does not regret one word of what he said.

I suspect that they wanted to censor the film because it made psychoanalysis look bad. Not only that, but it made psychoanalysis look like a cabal that was actively conspiring to prevent autistic children from receiving the best possible care. They were reasoning that if the best care comes from America it should not be allowed to enter France. They are willing to fight on the ramparts to prevent their country from being invaded. 

The debate over autism in France does not date to Sophie Robert’s film. In 2004 the Council of Europe condemned France for its substandard treatment of autism. Link here.

Sophie Robert refocused the debate by showing that the psychoanalytic understanding of autism had contributed mightily to the mistreatment of autistic children in France.

To place the legal issue in a larger context, I am informed that the judge who decided this case and who insisted that it be enforced immediately had in the past agreed to annul a Muslim marriage on the grounds that the bride was not a virgin.

Until her decision is overturned on appeal the reputation of the French civil justice system will suffer a serious loss of reputation itself.

When it comes to damaging a reputation, French psychoanalysts are masters of the game. They have so thoroughly discredited all behavioral approaches that no French psychologist or psychiatrist would dare to use such an approach on an autistic child. The fact that these approaches are far more effective does not count.

Moreover, the French  legal system has a law on the books that allows a court to remove an autistic child from his parents’ home on the grounds that they are not providing proper care—proper care being defined as a psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy.

This despite the fact that, as the film shows, there is no evidence whatever that psychoanalysis helps these children at all.

For their part French psychoanalysts are practicing a form of cultural protectionism or cultural mercantilism. Only rarely do we see this in the marketplace of ideas. It arises from a radical leftist mindset that seeks thought control at the cost of social benefit.

I will underscore the fact that many French neurologists are horrified by the French treatment of autism. The country that gave us Louis Pasteur and Pierre and Marie Curie has long held a distinguished place in scientific research. No French scientist, serious or unserious, has ever imagined judging scientific results by their country of origin. Many neurologists have contacted Sophie Robert to assert their support for her work and their willingness to testify to the latest scientific facts about autism.

Nevertheless, French psychoanalysts have managed to make France look like a nation of cultural troglodytes.

There are approximately 600,000 autistic children in France today. 80% of them receive no schooling at all. The nation has the resources to treat 700 with the newest and most effective therapeutic techniques. Approximately 1000 or so autistic children have been sent by their parents to Belgium. Sophie Robert calls them “medical refugees.”

Worse yet, since psychoanalysis places all the blame on the mother, it contributes to a line of thinking that declares separation from the mother to be a therapeutic benefit.  There is a law in France that allows the government to remove autistic children from their homes if their parents refuse to offer them proper care, that is, psychoanalytically-oriented treatment.

This despite the fact that no evidence demonstrates the efficacy of this treatment. In effect, autistic children are warehoused in France.

Parents of autistic children live in terror of their government and the psychiatric establishment. Thus they have been slow to speak up about the way their government had been treating them.

Until now…

Because of the psychoanalysts' lawsuit, an army of mothers has started to mobilize in order to exert political pressure on the French government and to break down the influence that psychoanalysts exercise on it. Link here.

Through Facebook and the blogosphere women across France have been organizing to save their children, and even to give them productive lives. For now the government has begun to respond positively.

Of course, psychoanalysts in France exercise considerable influence. You will be surprised to learn that the French national health system pays generously for psychoanalytic sessions.

American insurance companies had done so in the past, but they ultimately decided that it was not cost efficient to pay for a treatment that could not show consistently positive results.

When you are dealing with a government-run system you do not need to demonstrate results. You need to be able to exercise political influence.

In all fairness we must give the analysts themselves some credit. They have succeeded in using their political influence to dupe the French government into putting them on the national payroll.

Moreover, psychoanalysts have developed techniques for terrorizing and silencing their opposition. They have mixed their anti-Americanism with accusations that anyone who disagrees with their theory is a fascist and an anti-Semite.

Now they have taken their war on free discussion to a new level by having a court ban a film because they find that it makes them look bad.

Those of you who still believe that psychoanalysis is consistent with the principles of free speech should do some serious rethinking.

If it should happen that Sophie Robert’s film is removed from the internet, you can gain some historical context by looking at the well-known biofilm called Temple Grandin.

The film has justly won numerous prizes and awards; it is an exceptional piece of work made extraordinary by the performance of Claire Danes.

If you watch the film through the lens of the current French debate you will see that when Temple Grandin was a child, in early 1950s America, psychoanalysis provided the framework through which autism was treated.

We see one scene where Temple’s mother is discussing her daughter with an eminent psychiatrist. The psychiatrist explains that autism is an infantile schizophrenia caused by the child’s bad relationship with her mother.

These same ideas appear in the mouths of today’s most renowned French psychoanalysts.

The psychiatrist also wanted to institutionalize Temple for life. Her mother refused to accept that verdict and insisted that her daughter receive an education.

Temple Grandin went to college, received a masters and a doctorate, and currently works as a professor at Colorado State University. She has been widely honored for her influential work in cattle ranching.

She is still autistic. There is no doubt that she suffers from this neurological affliction. And yet, she has managed to use her considerable intelligence to make an important contribution to society. Surely, this is far, far better than the kind of institutionalization that her psychiatrist proposed in early 1950s America and that is commonplace in France today.

In the movie Temple she expresses heartfelt gratitude to her mother for not giving up on her and for not acceding to professional opinion. I like to think that people like Temple Grandin’s mother were instrumental in undermining the influence that psychoanalysis had on the treatment of autism in America.

Of course, it is striking that French psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are today in exactly the same place that their American counterparts were in six decades ago. It shows that French psychoanalysts are suffering from arrested moral development.

At the very least they should stay out of the arena of public relations. By trying to defend their own reputations they have made Sophie Robert’s film into a call to arms against psychoanalysts. They have mobilized an army of mothers, a group that, I venture, they will never defeat.

For worse, or perhaps for better, they have thrown their own profession into disrepute.

Romneymania

Who better to provide us with some clarity on the Republic primary contests than a satirical publication like The Onion. It offers this:

From coast to coast, town to town, and in nearly every public meeting place and private residence across America, millions have been captivated, inspired, and in some cases moved to tears by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who now finds himself campaigning before a nation in the throes of full-scale Romneymania.

"The raw energy and enthusiasm Mitt Romney stirs inside people is like nothing I've ever seen," Youngstown, OH auto mechanic Chris Ritenour said Wednesday. "Everything he says resonates with Americans. His moving story of growing up privileged, his inspiring rise from moderate wealth to overwhelming riches, his thrilling work in the highest echelons of corporate finance—he really speaks to the heart and mind of the common man."

No one says it better than The Onion. Today, Romney’s candidacy is ascending again. InTrade has him a prohibitive favorite. And yet, no one really feels anything for him.

If you are looking for emotion today, you will only find it in the Republican politicians and pundits who are passionately opposed to Newt Gingrich. Politico reports on it here.

Republicans who are passionately opposed to Gingrich seem to have missed Norm Coleman’s telling remarks.

When you allow yourself to be consumed by a negative passion you are not very likely to be thinking very clearly or very well.

Former senator Norm Coleman advises the Romney campaign. He has pointed out that a president Romney will not really be able to repeal all of Obamacare.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized this morning:

The larger point is that the path of least political resistance for the GOP would be to revert to its historic minority role as tax collectors for the welfare state, and this temptation is especially strong for health care. No one doubts that repealing and replacing ObamaCare will be a hard slog if the party does take the White House and Senate in 2012, namely because the American political system is designed to make change hard (even if those controls failed in 2010 amid Democratic abuses). Mr. Coleman's advice is, essentially, why bother trying.

The counselors of despair who want to sign a health-care armistice before the battle lines are even drawn are the sort of people who make the public cynical about politics. The entire GOP establishment claims in public it wants to scotch ObamaCare before the program is entrenched in 2014, because that is what the voters want. But if Mr. Coleman is any indication, some GOP elites will dump this political slogan when a faculty member shows up to vouchsafe her new respect for their moderation and realism.

Is this what it means to run a campaign without emotion, without passion, and without any real feeling? Do people feel disconnected from Romney because they know, in their gut, that a man who has no emotion can only be trusted to maintain the status quo?

Naturally, the Romney campaign has disavowed Coleman’s remarks. But since the campaign and the candidate are nothing but disciplined, what are the odds that Coleman just let it slip.

The Journal tells us what the true test should be:

But if his real ObamaCare convictions are akin to Mr. Coleman's—if Republicans ought to "repeal the bad and keep the good," as Mr. Romney once put it in 2010—then voters should know that now, before he becomes the nominee. If those aren't his convictions, then Mr. Coleman shouldn't be anywhere near his campaign.

Does anyone really believe that that will happen?

Yesterday, Harvard Professor and Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson presented an analysis of the Romney candidacy that closely resembles the one offered by The Onion:

A large part of the appeal of Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate is that he is the quintessential American Technocrat. His educational résumé couldn’t do more to convey managerial competence: the guy has degrees from both Harvard Law and Harvard Business schools. He has ticked every box the United States has to offer a compulsive doer, going forward with laserlike focus on win-win execution (this is how technocrats talk). He has built from scratch a successful private-equity business, Bain Capital. He has turned around a major public event, the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. He has been a state governor. I live in Massachusetts; not even his political opponents question Romney’s aptitude. And despite some recent bad press and months of attacks by his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign is running as smoothly as a McKinsey flow chart crossed with a BMW engine.

To the kind of people who spend their careers inside elite institutions, the technocratic turn is welcome. Decisions about economic policy, they reason, are too difficult to be entrusted to the people’s elected representatives. And if it makes sense to entrust monetary policy to unelected experts at central banks, then why not do something similar for fiscal policy? After all, voters will never back the kind of tough measures that need to be taken to stabilize Western budgets. They want jam today, paid for in 30 years at the earliest. Hence our chronic deficits.

If you trust the experts but not the people, Romney is your guy. If you want a manager, Romney is your guy.

But, if you want someone who knows Washington well enough to effect real change, then Romney will come up short.

Ironically, when Romney charges that Gingrich is a Washington insider he is obfuscating his own lack of experience in the federal government.

Ferguson continues his column by making a point that Newt Gingrich has made: Mitt Romney is a manager and not a leader. He is not judging the candidates as stand-alone figures. He is evaluating them in terms of what a new president will need to do to lead the nation.

Ferguson writes:

The sacrifices we need to make are bound to be painful: just look what Greece and Italy are going through now. Yet people can tolerate job losses, spending cuts, and tax hikes if they believe that a payoff will come in the foreseeable future. How to persuade them of that? The only way is through political leadership. And that means inspirational speeches and fireside chats.

Technocrats suck at these.

Ask yourself: what is Mitt Romney’s biggest weakness as a candidate (apart from his being a multimillionaire who pays an “effective” tax rate of 15 percent)? The answer is that he has all the rhetorical flair of a PowerPoint presentation. Despite years of practice and doubtless the best team of public-speaking coaches on the planet, he simply can’t stand in front of a lectern without turning into an immaculate wooden carving of himself emitting strange prerecorded messages from a human impersonator on Planet Vulcan. And if he’s bad with a script, he’s even worse off the cuff.

It isn’t easy to grasp what is involved in political leadership, but Ferguson explains it clearly and cogently. In one way or another everyone who has been analyzing the Romney candidacy has been saying exactly the same thing.

If you believe that the nation will need a leader who can rally the nation behind a program of fiscal austerity, then, Romney does not seem to be the best candidate.

Why then is everyone so troubled over Mitt Romney’s lack of emotion?

From a moral perspective the absence of emotion is always suspect.  Often, on this blog, I have voiced my opposition to therapists who declare that it is good to express all of one’s feelings, to let it all hang out and to wear your heart on your sleeve.

Thereby I join those moral thinkers who value self-control and discipline over emotional intemperance.

This does not mean that I, or Aristotle, with whom this argument originated, am against all expressions of emotion. While it is not a good idea to go around being angry all the time, it is also not a good idea not to feel anger when the occasion merits it.

As the philosopher put it, your goal should be to express the right emotion at the right time in the right place to the right person under the right circumstances.

If you are angry all the time your anger will only reflect on you. If you are never angry you will be acting servile and overly compliant. If do not feel anger when you should you will be showing that you do not really get it. An appropriate emotion demonstrates that you are in touch with reality.

Yesterday James Taranto suggested that the Republican Party is facing a choice between a candidate who is too angry and a candidate who is not angry enough.

He wrote: “Republicans, on the other hand, have to choose between the scrappy Gingrich and the more complaisant Mitt Romney. The contrast between the two is most evident in their descriptions of the president, whom Gingrich calls a dangerous radical and Romney describes as a nice guy in over his head. To our mind, Obama is neither as dangerous as Gingrich suggests nor as nice as Romney says. But the important thing about these statements is what they tell us about the men making them and the character of the campaign each is likely to run.

Obama has long had very poor approval ratings among independent voters, which ought to make him easy to defeat. Obama's angry appeal is not going to win over unhappy independents. The great imponderable is whether Gingrich's anger would put them off and thereby neutralize Obama's--or, to put it another way, whether independent voters are fed up enough with Obama to respond to Gingrich's angry appeal the way Republicans do.

Of course, there’s more to the electorate than independent voters.

Will Republican voters find it in their hearts to back a Romney candidacy that feels wan and dispirited? Will they rally to a campaign whose attacks seem mostly directed against Republicans?

Or, would they turn out in greater numbers for a Gingrich who expresses their anger at Obama and their rage against Obama’s media enablers?

Yesterday, for example, Mitt Romney criticized Gingrich for attacking the media. Isn’t it strange that the presumptive Republican nominee is defending a media establishment that will do everything in its power to re-elect Barack Obama?

It wasn’t very long ago that South Carolina Republicans voted for Gingrich because he has been willing to stand up to the media and to call them out for their unabashed support for Obama. How quickly people forget.

While Gingrich has been attacking Obama and his media enablers, Romney and the Republican establishment have been training their guns on Newt Gingrich.

One assumes that eventually they will train their guns on Obama. But, if there is no passion for the Romney candidacy, and if the candidate himself does not evince any passion, where will the anger come from? Will the Republican base become dispirited?

Will a man without anger be able to channel anger? One doubts it.

For now those who are lining up to support Romney are more anti-Gingrich than pro-Romney. If their main reason for supporting Romney is that he is neither Gingrich nor Obama, he would, were he elected, have no real governing mandate.

Perhaps Norm Coleman was right. Elect Romney and Obamacare is here to stay.

Obama Treats the American People Like 8th Graders

There’s talking down to people, and then, there’s condescending.

Delivering a speech that is pitched at an 8th grade reading comprehension level must count as both talking down and condescending. Even when the speaker is the President of the United States.

It’s not the first time that Barack Obama took the American people for a bunch of 8th graders. He has always spoken to Americans as though they were prepubescent preteens.

By comparison, his twelve predecessors have pitched their speeches to late 10th grade reading comprehension.

Politico reports the bad news:

President Obama's 2012 State of the Union address again rated at an 8th grade comprehension level on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test — the third lowest score of any State of the Union address since 1934.

The University of Minnesota's Smart Politics conducted an analysis on the last 70 State of the Union addresses and found that President Obama's three addresses have the lowest grade average of any modern president. "Obama's average grade-level score of 8.4 is more than two grades lower than the 10.7 grade average for the other 67 addresses written by his 12 predecessors," they conclude.

"The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores," the University of Minnesota's Eric Ostermeier explains.

Either Obama thinks that the American people are not very bright, or he believes that the people who voted for him are poorly educated, or else he himself thinks like an eighth grader.

I report; you decide.