Cheap tricks and tweets

Romney in Iowa (prepared text of a speech in Ames, via Political Animal):

Four years ago, candidate Obama spoke to the scale of the times. Today, he shrinks from it, trying instead to distract our attention from the biggest issues to the smallest—from characters on Sesame Street and silly word games to misdirected personal attacks he knows are false.

I.e., Big Bird and word games are the big issues, personal attacks are the small ones. Or it it the other way around? He's the one who brought up Big Bird, he must have thought it was important at the time. Then again most of the misdirected personal attacks Obama knows are false are directed against Obama, aren't they?

A lie in this speech I hadn't seen before, about

the college student, graduating this spring, with 10 to 20 thousand dollars in student debt, who now learns that she also will be paying for 50 thousand dollars in government debt, a burden that will put the American Dream beyond her reach.

Obama's going to make us all pay our share of the national debt?

From MIT, Gangnam style in one of its funnier versions, with an appearance by Professor Noam Chomsky (at 3:20) totally stealing the show, via Language Log.

It's the first snowflake of the season!

@rumsfeldofficeHey Uncle Donald don't judge government bureaucracies by what happened when you ran them.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 31, 2012

The assistant secretary tried to defend herself, but there were too many of them. From The Fun Times Guide.

A wonderful device by Dylan Matthews and Ezra Klein, Romney's Revenue Meter, allows you to play games with Romney's tax cut numbers, instantly working out how you could make them work out by eliminating this or that deduction or tax expenditure or adding this or that tax, though not of course by doing anything Romney says he's prepared to do.  Of no use in arguing with the proverbial obnoxious brother-in-law (for the record, I have three brothers-in-law and not one of them would vote for Romney)—he would just deny the assumptions.

The Heritage Foundation discovered a flaw in the logic behind wind energy: turns out that the wind doesn't always blow.

Installing Windmills Doesn’t Make the Wind Blow. Here's what @dwkreutzer has to say: herit.ag/SxtXE5
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) October 31, 2012

Jeez, those stupid scientists never thing of anything!

Happy Halloween! On West End Avenue, I just saw a mom in "binders full of women" costume. It was nowhere near as fancy as these Ohio ladies, but a pleasant sight all the same.

From Talking Points Memo.