Nice, sharp column by Jack Shafer.

Say what you will about Ralph Nader and H. Ross Perot, but they ran relatively honest campaigns on the issues, and the voters rejected them. The political market spoke many years ago and continues to speak: Telling the truth is not great for campaigns – and if it were, more people would be doing it.

The one presidential candidate in recent memory to win the White House posing as a truth teller was Jimmy Carter, who famously promised early in his campaign: “I’ll never tell a lie” and “I’ll never knowingly make a misstatement of fact” as president. These promises drew instant fire from the press, most notably Steven Brill, who flayed him in a March 1976 Harper’s piece titled “Jimmy Carter’s Pathetic Lies” (subscription required). Carter, who told no fewer lies than the average candidate, paid a political price for his promise, as everyone turned up their radar. “By saying that he would never tell a lie, Carter decided for himself that that’s going to be his standard,” said Alan Baron, George McGovern’s press secretary. “Well, fine, let’s hold him to it.” As soon as they could, voters replaced the non-lying liar with Ronald Reagan, a man so smooth even he didn’t know when he was lying.

Interesting paper by a trio of complexity theorists about the near-term implications of the US drought. Abstract reads:

Recent droughts in the midwestern United States threaten to cause global catastrophe driven by a speculator amplified food price bubble. Here we show the effect of speculators on food prices using a validated quantitative model that accurately describes historical food prices. During the last six years, high and fluctuating food prices have lead to widespread hunger and social unrest. While a relative dip in food prices occurred during the spring of 2012, a massive drought in the American Midwest in June and July threatens to trigger another crisis. In a previous paper, we constructed a model that quantitatively agreed with food prices and demonstrated that, while the behavior could not be explained by supply and demand economics, it could be parsimoniously and accurately described by a model which included both the conversion of corn into ethanol and speculator trend following. An update to the original paper in February 2012 demonstrated that the model previously published was predictive of the ongoing price dynamics, and anticipated a new food crisis by the end of 2012 if adequate policy actions were not implemented. Here we provide a second update, evaluating the effects of the current drought on global food prices. We find that the drought may trigger the expected third food price bubble to occur sooner, before new limits to speculation are scheduled to take effect. Reducing the amount of corn that is being converted to ethanol may address the immediate crisis. Over the longer term, market stabilization requires limiting financial speculation.

Terrific Guardian column by Simon Jenkins. Excerpt:

The one straw at which ministers and generals will grasp is that as long as the war lasts, it helps them lobby for money. Ever since Nato lost its reason for existing, its task has been to find a purpose. It has dragged out the insane Afghan conflict for 11 years. Why stop now? In the one battle that matters to a modern army – the battle for resources – the Taliban is not an enemy but an ally.

What do officials say nowadays to the relatives of the 433 British and 2,000 American who have died fighting in Afghanistan. Do they say they have avenged the dead of 9/11, taught the Taliban a lesson, “sent a message” to militant Islam, helped rebuild a poor country? They cannot surely be repeating Gordon Brown’s line, that their deaths are making Britain’s streets safer. London now has to be patrolled by armed policemen, and a billion pounds spent protecting the Olympics.

The truth is that British troops are dying in Afghanistan because no British government has the guts to admit they are there to no purpose. Military lobbyists shelter behind the “bravery of our boys” to sustain defence spending. No party dares question the war or its objective, for fear of demeaning heroism. The war is not mentioned at party conferences. Money is poured into drone bombing, despite its manifest counter-productivity. The coalition claims to be “training” a 350,000-strong local army and police force, but knows them to be unreliable, a new Taliban in the making.

Well, well. This from the Boston Globe.

Mitt Romney had harsh words for welfare recipients in a hidden-camera videotape from a May fundraiser that was leaked this week.

But his own father was once among public aid recipients.

As the Globe has previously reported, George Romney’s family fled from Mexico in 1912 to escape a revolution there, and benefited from a $100,000 fund established by Congress to help refugees who had lost their homes and most of their belongings.

That fund may have been what Lenore Romney, George Romney’s wife and Mitt Romney’s mother, was referring to in a video that was posted online earlier this month but has received renewed attention in the wake of Mitt Romney’s comments.

“[George Romney] was on welfare relief for the first years of his life. But this great country gave him opportunities,” Lenore Romney said in the video, which apparently dates back to George Romney’s 1962 run for governor of Michigan.

Lovely New Yorker piece by John Cassidy about Mittster. Excerpt:

Say what you like about Mitt Romney—I’ve already said a lot—but he rarely fails to come through when his opponents need him. If Jimmy Carter’s grandson, the would-be opposition researcher who evidently helped to dig up the offending video, had written the script himself he could hardly have come up with something more damaging than the videos secretly taped at a Boca Raton fundraiser this spring and published by Mother Jones on Monday. What sort of candidate, speaking in a quasi-public setting—there are potential leakers lurking in all fundraisers—would say almost half of the voters in the election “are dependent on the government,” that they “believe that they are victims,” and then go on to say, “my job is not to worry about these people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”?

The answer proffered by my colleague Amy Davidson and numerous other commentators: a heartless plutocrat who holds the impoverished and the working poor in contempt. Sounding for all the world like Josiah Bounderby, the sneering mill owner in Dickens’s “Hard Times,” Romney went on to say, “I have inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way.” Bounderby, it turned out, had exaggerated his humble origins, and so, of course, has Romney—not that anybody could possibly believe him. When your father was the C.E.O. of a big auto company and the governor of Michigan, and you were educated at the three-hundred-acre campus of the Cranbrook School, posing as Horatio Alger is plain silly.

But, then, Romney is a profoundly silly candidate.

He’s always interesting. But the book isn’t out yet. Amazon is quoting October 4 as the publication date.