First things first: I don’t like Big Bird. I never have. Nor am I fond of those metrosexual cohabitors Burt and Ernie. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t fight for Sesame Street. If only for the sake of Grover, we must protect Sesame Street.

Romney’s comment about Sesame Street roiled me, but not about ending funding for PBS. Let’s be clear: all conservatives want to end funding of this kind. If a TV show isn’t interrupted every 10 minutes so that corporations can sell stuff, what is the point? Am I right?!

But Romney said more than that. Here is the full quote:

Alas.

As I’ve discussed before, We Are Our Own Investors. If our government debt is owned to any monolithic creature, it is the American People. China owns roughly 7.5% of our debt. Total foreign debt ownership is roughly a third—half what we Americans own. So this is a non-issue. What’s more, it is a fact that Mitt Romney surely knows; his statement is demagoguery plain and simple.

What’s more, the implication of this claim is that by China holding government debt, they control us. If they decide to get stop buying our debt it will cause our economy to collapse. China is—according to those who make this claim—propping up the value of the dollar. The exact opposite is the truth. As Dean Baker has pointed out, the reason China owns as much of our debt as they do is because they peg their currency artificially low compared to the dollar. Mitt Romney might have heard about this since he’s always talking about it with regards to manufacturing. Another aspect of this is that China can buy our bonds for less than they are worth.

That is why China owns 7.5% of our government debt. But regardless of this, 7.5% is not all or most or even a lot.

If Mitt Romney wants to kill Big Bird (and I wouldn’t complain), he needs to come up with a better reason than China.

Update (5 October 2012 2:28 pm)

If there is one thing I can spot from 3000 miles away it is intellectual pretense. Why? Because I am the fucking intellectual pretense master! And if I am willing to call myself on it, you can bet that I’m going to call that twitter happy mother fucker Matt Yglesias on his!

Yglesias starts an otherwise interesting article (Not that I agree with him!) with this sentence: “Mitt Romney’s decision to use Sesame Street’s Big Bird character as a synecdoche for cutting funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting…”

Synecdoche? Really? Let me be blunt: I’m sure Yglesias had never even heard the word until he saw Synecdoche, New York. And there is nothing (Nada! Rien! Nichts!) that is more intellectually pretentious than repeating something you got from a movie!

But it’s worse that this. Yglesias clearly either didn’t look up the word or didn’t understand the definition. I understand this. “Synecdoche” is a hard word. But this is why those of us who try to push past our intellectual pretense into something actually intellectual are so tired all the time. This clearly does not apply to Yglesias who manages to write 7-10 articles and 50-100 tweets every day. (The man clearly needs a girlfriend, a boyfriend, or a dog.)

Anyway, back to my point: Big Bird is not a synecdoche of PBS funding. Big Bird is not even a synecdoche of Sesame Street! The idea behind the word “synecdoche” is the representation of the part for the whole. So we could use the muppets as a short hand for Sesame Street. We could say, “I don’t want to see the muppets out of work.” That would be a clever way to say, “I don’t want to see Sesame Street defunded.” Big Bird is a specific example, but he is not a class of things that make up Sesame Street. What Yglesias meant to use was something like “exemplar” or “representative.” But instead, he used “synecdoche” because, hey, all hip people are into Charlie Kaufman.

There is another reason why I don’t like Yglesias’ use of this word: almost no one knows it. And of those who do, 99 out of 100 know it because of the film. And that’s just fucked up.

If I could have a beer with anyone on the internet, tonight it would be Farhad Manjoo. I know what you’re thinking, “You mean that guy who says he divorced his wife because she puts two spaces after the end of a sentence?” Yep. He’s my kind of guy!

Don’t pooh-pooh this behavior. If I could choose between world peace & justice and having everyone properly typeset their em-dashes, it would be the latter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much in favor of peace & justice. It is just that I believe if we could just get this em-dash issue squared away, peace & justice would naturally come.

Earlier this week, when the little minds were fretting over the upcoming presidential debate, Majoo was addressing a far more important issue: article pagination on websites. You see, most websites break up long articles onto multiple pages. They do this primarily to support their ad revenue. But I noticed this habit long before ads, so I tend to think it is also about giving articles gravitas. “See how important this article is: you have to click to continue!”

I don’t think Manjoo got to the heart of what is really bad about web pagination. He did in a general sense, but he didn’t get to the core of why people like me really hate having to click to continue. And this is not just a problem of the standard article break up that Manjoo is talking about; it is even more common (and thus annoying) with the dreaded “Below the fold” link. Below the fold? What fold? What is the matter with you people?!

The problem with pagination is that it slows everything down. It isn’t the clicking or even the time it takes to load the main page elements. What really slows everything down is the ads. Clearly the ad servers are overworked. Because it doesn’t matter whether you go to New York Magazine or Daily KOS, the page will load and you will wait around for the ads to work their magic. Each day, Crooks & Liars has a blog roundup. I now open another browser tab and copy the links into it, rather than click back and wait for Crooks & Liars to reload all of its ads.

This is what makes pagination in a book different from pagination on a website: delay. Of course, there are other reasons as Farhad Manjoo discusses. The main one is just that it isn’t necessary. People know how to scroll! So just display your content and let us work with it!

Other than this minor augmentation, I am pretty much in agreement with him about all issues typographic. On the issue of wives, I’m perhaps more particular. Not only do I think it is all right to divorce a spouse for a preference for pagination or putting two spaces after a sentence, I would divorce a wife who doesn’t think H. W. Fowler is a hunka hunka burning love.

CAMBRIDGE, MA—A team of considerate, emotionally available researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Monday the results of a study indicating that in a random sampling of five women, not even one has any idea how beautiful she actually is. “In clinical trials, we discovered 100 percent of test subjects were virtually oblivious to the fact that they are and always have been thoughtful, intelligent, and truly gorgeous, inside and out,” sensitive scientist Sidney Kaplan said of the four-year, $30 million study aimed at showing women what they just can’t seem to see for themselves. “Perhaps even more alarming, we found that 87 percent of women felt it was their job to try to make themselves into someone they aren’t, instead of looking in the mirror and rejoicing at what they had already become. And trust me, what they had already become is perfect.” The receptive and caring authors of the study said their work would be published in the forthcoming issue of Nature and available to women “anytime they need to hear it.”

Via Andrew Kaczynski at BuzzFeed, Romney Contradicts Himself On Cutting Taxes Of The Wealthy From Earlier Debate:

Romney also said the rich would not get a tax cut at all.

A tale of two Romneys? Does it matter? If this country votes for this fucktard then they deserve him. Of course, lots of innocent people will suffer. But what else is new?

“Office Space” actor Ron Livingston is cheering on his sister, TV news anchor Jennifer Livingston, as she takes on a viewer who emailed her a critique of her weight.

Did you see the Mitt Romney Show last night? It was great! Romney spun a lot of tall tales and made all kinds of promises to good little American citizens. It might not have been such a good show had Romney’s co-stars Barack Obama and Jim Lehrer not been so passive. Luckily, many people in the press are today doing what would normally have been done last night, if the Mitt Romney Show had been something else like, say, a presidential debate.

One of the best discussions of Romney’s tall tales is by Jonathan Cohn over at The New Republic, The Four Most Misleading Moments in Romney’s Debate Performance. Cohn isn’t actually talking about “moments” in the debate; he’s talking about the debate itself. His four moments are pretty general and took up most of Romney’s 38 minutes: taxes; the deficit and spending cuts; medicare; and healthcare and pre-existing conditions.

I’ve written about most of this before, so I’m not going to go into right now. Nor am I going to quote from his effort to set the record straight. Read the whole article—it’s worth it. What I found most interesting was that Cohn ends the article with the exasperation that I seem to feel all the time these days:

I would add only that given the back and forth on this question, Romney’s claim is “Pants on fire!”

Another excellent article is Igor Volsky in Think Progress, At Last Night’s Debate: Romney Told 27 Myths In 38 Minutes. He’s just being nice, of course. By “myths” he means “lies.” It is hard to know what to quote here. I recommend clicking over and reading the whole thing.

I did like this statement that puts some numbers to “block granting” that Republicans think is a panacea:

And this is, of course, why Republicans push block granting. It is a way to “starve the beast.” This is one of the reasons that Republicans aggravate me so much: they talk around what they believe. I don’t blame them, though; they have no choice; their ideas are toxic.

It’s too bad the Democratic Party doesn’t have a leader who point out these things in real time. And as for Lehrer, maybe we could use a moderator who is a little younger and plugged in?

It is hard to get excited about voter suppression efforts. After all, it is much the same as screaming, “Republicans exist!” But here is another example, and frankly, I am shocked at how endless the endeavor is. I know: the Republicans don’t have a real popular base. They explicitly do the bidding of the 1% (and even more: the 0.01%) and get roughly half the country to vote for them on issues like abortion and gay marriage—issues they do little about other than the stock the courts (which may be enough).

This particular voter suppression effort is of the Republican “Poll Challenger Training.” You will get a taste of it in the video below which was recorder undercover by ProgressNow New Mexico. But it is deeper than this. As the article discusses, this isn’t just a case of a volunteer being over-zealous or under informed. The disinformation comes from the Republican pamphlet.

At my core, I believe people do what they think is right. I’m sure that Pat Morlen really believes that voter fraud is a big problem. She probably watches Fox News where one can be forgiven from thinking that the only reason Obama is President is because ACORN stole the election. But you would think that the party organ would at least get the facts right in their publications. This is what comes from allowing the crazies on the inside: eventually, crazy seems sane.

I spent the debate “live blogging” over at The Reaction. You can go over there to see my reactions as they occurred in real time. My initial thinking was that Romney did better than I had expected—and I expected him to do fairly well. But I didn’t think that Romney necessarily “won” the debate, whatever that might mean. He did, however, dominate it. He talked a lot more.

What surprised me was just how hostile the liberal reaction was to the debate. I guess this makes sense, though. They want the president to be a fighter. I feel the same way. For example, I couldn’t believe some of the things that Romney was able to get away with. In particular, I hate his claim that he can’t give specifics about his policies because that’s not how you negotiate. Never has a bigger pile of bullshit excreted from a politician.

Regardless of how the debate went for the pundits, my overall reaction was that Romney was even worse than I had thought. For a while, I’ve been pushing this line that Romney’s tax plan is, Trust me. But now I see that this is his plan for everything. Education reform? Trust me. Financial reform? Trust me. Healthcare reform? Trust me! It reminds me of Nixon’s secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. You may remember that the war didn’t actually end until he was out of office.

The more substantive point regarding the debate was that Romney’s policy ideas changed radically. Now he’s not giving a tax break to the wealthy! Now he’s going to cover pre-existing conditions by—Wait for it!—magic! He’ll increase funding for education. And the military. And anything else that you might like. It reminded me of the Michael Dukakis line from 1988: Mitt Romney is the Joe Isuzu of politicians. Or if you’re too young to get the reference: Mitt Romney claims to be Santa Claus.

President Obama has always been an “eat your broccoli” kind of guy. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that he used the debate to talk to the American people like they were adults. (As my friend Andrea would say, “That’s a mistake!”) But in the end, I think there is much fodder for the Obama campaign. Romney will get a bump from this, but over time, I think it reinforces the Romney nobody likes: the guy who will say anything to get elected.

Update (3 October 2012 9:24 pm)

A couple of debate tweets for you. First, Karen Finney and I seem to agree on the best line of the night, “Part of being a leader is being able to say what you’re going to do.” That to me sums up the whole debate. Matt Yglesias tweeted a question I have long asked, “If voucherizing Medicare for current old people is so terrible, why does Romney want to do it for me?” And finally, Dean Baker made the best collection of tweets of the night. I particularly liked this one, “Romney knows about picking losers, 22 out of 77 companies in his tenure at Bain Capital according to my colleague Eileen Appelbaum.”

Update (3 October 2012 10:17 pm)

Paul Krugman has something to say. I will quote it in full since it is short:

Update (4 October 2012 9:11 am)

Josh Barro notes that Obama actually spoke 4 minutes longer than Romney. As Barro correctly points out, “It certainly didn’t feel like that watching the debate.” However, Michael B. Dougherty points out that Romney spoke 500 more words.