Pun Salad

No changes in our candidate list this week; nobody either rose above or dropped below 4% or better at Intrade, no matter how much they may have deserved to. I still don't understand why Scott Brown is given such high odds at Intrade (7.7%), but I completely understand why he's popped up to second place in our poll:

(To be fair, Brown didn't so much surge in phoniness, as the previous contenders, Romney and Palin, collapsed. Unexpectedly!)

• Intrade says President Obama (or, more accurately, the Democrats) are 61% likely to retain the White House next year. Sean Hannity ain't buying it.

  That narrative is so phony, and the media is pushing this. Let me give you a quick few numbers here, 58 percent overall disapprove his handling of the economy, 57 percent disapprove on health care, 53 percent on Medicare, 53 on taxes, 64 on the federal deficit and 73 percent disagree with him on the gas prices. I mean, that pretty much covers everything.

  The narrative is phony, but (to be fair) that simply means it matches the phoniness of the leading candidates.

• Heh, but Sarah Palin sure stuck her foot in her mouth when she mused on camera about Paul Revere out to warn the British about the colonist militia, right?

  Well, not so fast, noted William Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection. As it turns out, Governor Palin might know a bit more about Paul Revere than her phony critics. It turns out that one of his activities that night was (under duress) letting the British know that he'd warned the colonists. Who knew? Besides Sarah, that is.

  David Friedman comments:

  The first mistake of the people attacking Palin--accusing her of thinking that Revere was riding to warn the British rather than the Americans--is either careless reading or deliberate dishonesty. The second mistake--making fun of the idea that he warned the British--is historical ignorance. I am in a poor position to criticize that ignorance since, until the question came up as a result of Palin' comment, I shared it.

  For the record: me too.

• In Time, Michael Scheuer assures us that Mitt Romney has learned his lesson from 2008:

  All year, the Romney strategy has been to keep an eye on this ball. His aides long ago decided that Romney's great failure in 2008 was his effort to be an all-of-the-above candidate, striving to appeal to all voters at the same time, feeding the impression that he was a pandering phony. The painful experience also taught Romney's team the importance of not getting distracted by the daily scrums of a presidential campaign.

  Has anyone noticed Romney acting a lot less phony this time around? Me neither.

• "50311 Dweller" writes to the Des Moines Register with advice to the candidates:

  It sounds very phony when Mitt Romney and President Obama drop the g's when they speak in the more rural states, "goin' " and "runnin', " for example. They should just speak in their normal way -- the way we expect them to speak.

  "50311 Dweller" is to be congratulated on his or her high expectations.