Michael Barone looks on at our young liberal activist counterparts and comes away curious: I have long been puzzled by the enthusiasm with which many young liberal bloggers cheer on proposals to raise tax rates on high earners. I can understand why they might favor them, but not why they seem to invest so much psychic energy in the issue. Some of this may just be team ball: You cheer

I’m sure this is precisely the kind of thing that will resonate with the anti-Hobbit crowd. But beyond that? Well, perhaps Romney’s plan is to turn voters hoping to appear sophisticated and, dare I say pragmatic, toward him by convincing them that any rhetoric beyond which he’s willing to go is by definition outrageous and “incendiary,” thereby setting the parameters for who comes to count as a principled Republican /

Women, children, minorities hardest hit. Jews, imperialist pigs, filthy humans belching CO2 like poison perambulatory smoke stacks to blame. Okay, so I made those last parts up. But it’s not like they weren’t thinking it.

And yet for some reason, many in the GOP establishment still crave the love and acceptance of these frauds and posers — whose insistence that their boldly revealed anti-intellectualism, worn with an arrogance that bespeaks a recognition that their reign as intellectual elites is born entirely of consensus group-think and sophistic “reasoning” marshaled solely as a will to power, is the height of sophisticated academic inquiry and learning should, when

And that someone would be? You guessed it: Mitt Romney, the very candidate who has trashed his opponents one by one, massively outspending them on negative advertising while allowing his organization and SuperPACs, through opposition research sent directly to “journalists,” to consistently misrepresent them and their records — all while he himself has concentrated on rewriting his own history as a politician, going from anti-Reagan campaigning to “severely conservative,” depending

GOP establishment types seem very excited this morning that Mitt Romney was able to win both one of his several “home” states — amassing 16 delegates to Santorum’s 14 (Romney won 41% to 38%) — and the state that keeps sending John McCain to the Senate. As a Republican. This, to them, augers well for their anointed candidate, serving as a sign that at least some in the GOP base

Marvel here as your ideological fellows all over the country go to the polls and once again press another progressive Republican on us, having been conditioned to believe that a conservative will turn off independents and “moderates” and is therefore “unelectable.” Now I know why Bill Murray spent a good part of Groundhog Day trying to figure out ways to kill himself.

So squeals Ezra Klein, a “pundit” perhaps best noted as some kid who likes to form secret groups with other leftwing journalists to both invent and then push the news cycle. The only problem is, this is Ezra Klein we’re talking about, which means there’s a near 100% he’s either purposely misreading data, spinning that data to create a narrative he’s hoping he can push on a technicality, or else

Yes, obviously. Because that’s what “severely conservative” candidates do: maintain “progressivity” — or, to put a finer point on it, maintain one of the 10 planks in the Communist Manifesto, the graduated income tax. CNS: Romney has a long record of opposing a flat tax–even investing more than $50,000 of his own money during the 1996 presidential campaign to run newspapers ads attacking then-presidential candidate Steve Forbes’s flat-tax proposal as

–is the way I’m paraphrasing it. For his part, Jim Geraghty offers this response in his “Morning Jolt”: Madam Secretary, with all the respect due to your office: Shut up. Your job is to represent us, not to tell us what we can and cannot say in response to American policy and overseas events. Some of the Afghanis most likely to allegedly get inflamed by the remarks made stateside are