The Pentagon Is Shrinking

And by Pentagon I don't mean some five-sided regular polygon somewhere -- I mean the US defense budget. Add this to the list of good things you wouldn't have seen under a McCain administration.

I don't have a great sense of how dynamics between the President and the armed forces go. I have the sense that Obama really doesn't want generals retiring and then deciding to go ballistic on his administration, and he's willing to sacrifice a lot to keep that from happening. But long-term defense cuts seem to be a genuine administration priority. If Leon Panetta's job is to ease the military through defense cuts, I'm happy to see him succeeding.

Go Ben Go!

Good news from the Fed -- Ben Bernanke is going to set an inflation target (2%, of course I wanted higher, but given the state of expectations this is a move in the right direction). And he's going to buy more bonds. Bank people are saying things like "My expectation is that we are going to get quantitative easing three in April." My expectation is that Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi are going to keep the recovery going into an Obama second term.

I don't know how good this is long term, though -- as a supporter of higher inflation, I'd rather Paul Volcker had set a 5% inflation target back in the bad old double-digit days, and people's expectations had stuck with that. Now we're going up to a low target rather than down to a high one.

2012 South Carolina Republican Primary Results Map

People liked these maps last time, so let's do them again. I find it quite frustrating that most election results maps don't do some sort of color coding to give everyone a sense of the magnitude of a candidate's victory in different parts of the country. In the case of South Carolina, we can see that the Appalachian foothills in the northwest corner of the state, as well as the counties surrounding Columbia, were somewhat more friendly to Mitt Romney than the rural areas in the rest of the state. Those light-brown ring counties don't seem to have any clear differences from the rural areas; they're roughly in line with the statewide levels of income, education, and African-American population.

Compared to 2008, the big difference was Romney's inability to hold any ground in the corridor between Columbia and Charleston, as well as smaller margins of victory for Romney in the less rural parts of the state. McCain did quite well in this part of the state, for reasons that aren't immediately clear to me.

Ezekiel Emanuel, Supposed Health Care Expert, Doesn't Know What's In Health Care Reform

Ezekiel Emanuel's article claiming that liberals "need to care about controlling health care costs every bit as much as conservatives do" may raise the cost of straw quite a bit. Emanuel seems to have depleted the global straw supply by packing so much of it into the gigantic straw man that is his article. Not one liberal who doesn't care about controlling health care costs is quoted.

If Emanuel wants to understand what liberals think about health care costs, he could look at the health care reform law that just passed Congress, and which all the liberal Democrats in the House and Senate voted for. It implements a wide range of cost controls. It would've had more if the public option hadn't been sacrificed to non-liberal Joe Lieberman, and if the end-of-life planning measures hadn't been demonized as "death panels" by liberal-hating Sarah Palin. The way Emanuel sets up the debate makes you wonder whether he doesn't know what's in health care reform, or if he's just ignoring it so that he can mischaracterize what liberals have been supporting in Congress. I'm not sure which reading is more charitable.

Florida Looks Like SC

Newt Gingrich has cause for optimism about Florida after winning South Carolina. Polling in the states looks pretty similar -- Gingrich had huge leads in late November and early December, but Romney stepped ahead after the big ad blitz that sunk Gingrich in Iowa. (I don't know if the Romney SuperPACs' anti-Gingrich ads were ever on the air in either of those states -- as far as I know it was just the spillover of media effects from Iowa that brought Gingrich's numbers back down.) So Gingrich's ability to come back in SC seems bodes well for his ability to come back in Florida. He had the debates as a source of good free media in SC, and he'll have that victory as a source of good free media in Florida to push him forward.