Because he has a high floor of support but also a very low ceiling, Texas Congressman Ron Paul is likely to have seen his high-water mark Tuesday. The results provided him little that helps him broaden his support in New Hampshire and subsequent primaries.

Now we have exit polls in New Hampshire to test Rove’s claim.

First, Ron Paul doubled his 2008 vote total in Iowa, but tripled his New Hampshire total, gaining over his previous high-water mark. And relative to the fiscally conservative, socially liberal/moderate voters we identified in our studies on the “Libertarian Vote,” Ron Paul seems to have over-performed in New Hampshire among several demographics:

1. Moderates/liberals on fiscal issues: Ron Paul took 28% compared to Romney’s 34%;
2. Conservatives on social issues:  Paul got 16% compared to Santorum’s 22%;
3. Evangelical/born-again: Paul took 21% compared to Santorum’s 23%;
4. “Is true conservative” most important: Paul won 41%, compared to Iowa, where he only won 37%;
5. High school or less education: Paul won 26% compared to 23% with more than high school (data show libertarians have higher education than average); and
6. Decided within last week: Paul won 19% compared to only 11% in Iowa.

Late deciders are particularly telling. If it were true that Ron Paul draws from only an ultra-loyal base, logically, these voters should have made up their mind long ago. Instead,  Paul gained over his Iowa totals among late deciders. Nearly one in five voters who decided within the last week picked Ron Paul. Many of these may well be fiscal moderates or liberals.

New Hampshire seems to be evidence that Paul is gaining beyond his libertarian base.

Q25. On another subject, what is your view of the Tea Party political movement – would you say you support it strongly, support it somewhat, oppose it somewhat or oppose it strongly?

           -------- Support --------   --------- Oppose --------     No
           NET   Strongly   Somewhat   NET   Somewhat   Strongly   opinion
12/18/11   42      13         28       45       20         26        13
11/3/11    43      14         29       44       20         24        13
10/2/11    42      12         30       47       20         27        11
9/1/11     47      13         35       45       18         27         8
7/17/11    44      13         31       46       23         24        10
6/5/11     46      13         33       44       21         24        10
4/17/11    42      16         26       49       21         27        10
10/3/10    38      13         25       36       28         18        26
5/5/10     27      17         10       24       11         13        44
*Note slightly different question wording 10/3/10 and 5/5/10

Depends on which question framing you like better. Pew’s question asks respondents whether they agree/disagree with the Tea Party,  and Washington Post asks respondents whether they support/oppose, strongly/somewhat. That’s a subtle but important difference. The agree/disagree framing is more binary and forces a choice as if the Tea Party stands for one thing. Washington Post’s question allows for a respondent who, say, supports  the Tea Party on spending cuts, but doesn’t agree with the Tea Party on some other issue. Such a respondent could “somewhat support.” That allows for a wider range of opinions. And  notice that respondents who say “no opinion” is higher with the Pew questions, usually a sign that respondents reject the question frame or that it doesn’t accurately capture how people think about it.

If you can show a picture to buy Sudafed, if you can show a picture to get on an airplane, you should be able to show a picture…to vote.

I’m not trying to defend the book from these charges — it is, indeed, all of these things on one level or another. Nor am I defending Objectivism or Rand herself.

But the Post seems intent to allow its writers to pen screeds against the book and its author while missing the underlying point.

Last week, film critic Mark Jenkins gave us a review with this leap of logic:

The bullet-train theme is somewhat ironic. A roaring locomotive is a dynamic image of American industrial power, but even in 1957 — when the book was published — the future of railroading was in Europe and Asia. And the right-of-center types who revere Rand tend to dismiss public funding for high-speed rail.

And then today, Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson gives us this gem:

But Rand’s distinctive mix of expressive egotism, free love and free-market metallurgy does not hold up very well on the screen. The emotional center of the movie is the success of high-speed rail — oddly similar to a proposal in Barack Obama’s last State of the Union address. All of the characters are ideological puppets. Visionary, comely capitalists are assaulted by sniveling government planners, smirking lobbyists, nagging wives, rented scientists and cynical humanitarians.

Setting aside the general inanity of Gerson’s entire column, ably dismissed here by Jesse Walker, the question remains: What do you people not get about the point of this book?

Hint: it’s not about high-speed rail.

It’s about human achievement and a couple of characters making happen something the rest of the world has deemed impossible.

It’s not about the benefits of funding rail transit from the public purse. It is in no way “ironic,” nor is it “oddly similar” to any proposal from any elected official anywhere in the world.

The critics who assail Atlas Shrugged for its over-the-top didacticism, one-dimensional characters, and simplistic philosophy (charges I won’t defend it against) should be sure they understand the underlying point. You know, the one that they criticize Rand for making too obvious.

And it’s not a meditation on the utilitarian benefits of different means of passenger transport.

While I’m still skeptical that BitCoin will ever be a serious currency, I don’t think it’s likely that there’s a bubble, at least not yet. Currently, BitCoins are trading at around $1.15 each on the exchanges that convert BTC and USD. And since there are just under six million BitCoins currently in existence (the number of coins “mined” in BitCoin parlance), that means the BitCoin economy is somewhere in the $7 million range. By 2140, the last BitCoins will be mined and the total number of BitCoins in existence will level out at about 21 million. Based on the current exchange rate, that’s somewhere around a $25 million economy.

I don’t see how this represents a bubble. Given current American macroeconomic policy, you’ll be lucky if you can buy a haircut for $25 million in 2140. And $7 million in 2011 is still pretty insignificant; it’s less than the budget deficit of Las Vegas. If a bubble existed, we’d be talking about the world of BitCoin being valued in the billion or tens of billions of dollars.

Plus, unlike dot-com shares or houses or tulips, the supply of BitCoins is fixed (though I look forward to seeing Tim’s thoughts on this tomorrow). About 30% of the total BitCoins ever to be mined already exist, and we know pretty much what the trajectory looks like over the next 130 years. This is as stable a supply as can exist, which makes it easier for markets to equilibriate. And to the extent a bubble does develop, it will likely be more a reaction of holders of US dollars to the fear of future inflation.

Finally, even if BitCoin remains a tiny, niche currency — so what? The costs of converting USD and BTC are negligible. As long as some sites and people take BitCoins, the currency can thrive. Think of PayPal. Now, certainly, PayPal accounts are denominated in dollars and Euros and sterling and other real-world currency. But I can’t send PayPal money to just anyone. Restaurants and meatspace retailers generally don’t take it. Many if not most people won’t take it. I can’t pay my doctor or my mechanic with PayPal money. But because I can make many transactions with it — and freely convert my PayPal dollars with dollars in my bank account — it’s still useful to me. BitCoins can play the same role with the feature not bug of having no central bank inflating their value and being exchangeable with traditional currencies.

So in short, while I doubt we’ll still know the name BitCoin in a decade, I’m not convinced that there’s any irrational exuberance inflating the value of BitCoins to unsupportable levels.

This fits the story into what Will Wilkinson helpfully calls the “progressive master narrative.” In the case of financial service prosecutions, the story runs something like this:

During the Bush administration, regulators were asleep at their jobs, because nobody believed in regulation. The Bush team slashed regulatory enforcement budgets [false] and allowed Wall Street firms to commit egregious criminal fraud because these firms are solid GOP donors [false]. They refused to prosecute obvious crimes or go for long sentences on miscreants [false]. Because the wrong people (i.e., Republicans) were in charge, they allowed these guys to get away with the financial equivalent of murder.

Despite some false premises, blindness to conflicting evidence, and leaps in logic, this isn’t an entirely indefensible worldview. You can argue — and conservatives tend to be as guilty of this as progressives — that having the right people running things matters most, and that the right guys will make the right decisions that lead to the right outcomes. Of course, at most this means that the right thing happens only about 50% of the time, but set that aside for the moment.

Where this train of thought falls apart is when Obama (to progressives, the right guy) is elected and begins to run things. So since progressives now have the right guy in charge, why aren’t the sociopaths and idiots who ran Wall Street into the ground facing charges?

The Times offers one hypothesis: because Bush-era regulators didn’t collect much evidence, it’s hard for the Obama DOJ to build a case. There’s little analysis to back this up. But it still fits nicely into the progressive master narrative. Later in the story, they suggest that the FBI didn’t invest significant enough resources into financial crimes because those resources were needed in other investigations. Again, this fits the progressive master narrative that government is under-resourced.

But my question to progressives is: If the right guys can’t or won’t bring criminal prosecutions after the meltdown of an entire sector of the US economy, despite having wide-ranging rules on the books like the “honest services fraud” law which would allow a decent federal prosecutor to indict a ham sandwich, under what set of circumstances do you think the right guys can identify a crisis (i.e., crime) before it occurs and stop it from occuring?

That the wrong guys didn’t collect evidence isn’t much of an answer. After all, that evidence didn’t exist before the crisis. Evidence is what is built up in the commission of a crime. If you can’t prosecute once all the facts are known, it’s impossible to say you could have seen it coming. You can’t see the future but not the past without an accident involving a contraceptive and a time machine.

A corollary to the master progressive narrative is that, had the right guys been in charge, they would have prevented this meltdown, this series of crimes, from occurring, because good regulators would have seen what was happening and stopped it.

But if prosecutors working for the right guys can’t prosecute a crime after it occurs, by what mechanism could regulators working for the right guys have stopped that crime?

The honest answer here is to admit that the Obama administration isn’t the “right guys.” And then the progressive solution falls apart entirely. Obama is the most progressive president since Johnson, and probably the most progressive president we’ll see for a generation. He’s the paragon of electable progressivism. If this administration isn’t “right” enough, no administration will ever be. And the progressive solution is thus assuming a can opener.

To be sure, by all accounts Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide and a number of the other executives at the helm of this Titanic were bozos who were really bad at their jobs and really good at scamming the system. And they largely reported to boards of directors who seemed to think that they had no real obligation to oversee the companies they were overseeing.

But it’s not obvious that a prosecutable crime occurred. And it’s even less obvious that anyone could have foreseen these crimes occurring before they did.

The challenge to progressives is to articulate a system of regulatory oversight and government regulation more generally that doesn’t depend on the right guys being in office — especially if the right guys as defined by progressives means officials to the left of Obama. And since the right guys seem unable or unwilling to prosecute crimes (statutory, common law, or imagined) after the fact, what makes it likely they would be able or willing to stop them before the fact?

What I found interesting is the lesson the WSJ editors suggest Republicans take from this:

Now the battle moves to the debt ceiling increase and Paul Ryan’s new 2012 budget later this year, and there are lessons from this fight to keep in mind. One is to focus on spending and budget issues, not extraneous policy fights. Republicans have the advantage when they are talking about the overall level of spending and ways to control it. They lose that edge when the debate veers off into a battle over social issues.

As I’ve argued previously, the Tea Party is split roughly 50-50 between libertarians and social conservatives. Spending and budget issues unite the Tea Party. Social issues divide them. In House Republican’s first big test, leadership seems to have gotten the message.

But isn’t this a sign of how far the GOP has come in a libertarian direction? Could you imagine such a compromise even a few years ago under George W. Bush’s Republican Party? Surely, there is much, much more Republicans could do. But for now, a good sign that the libertarian half of the Tea Party is winning.

What’s amazing though — acoustic coupler modem, ASCII-only display, and feathered haircuts aside — is that newspapers didn’t really know what they were doing in 1981, just as they don’t really seem to know what they’re doing now. Reports one editor, ”This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us as editors and reporters, and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we’re not going to make much either.”

Spoiler alert: The clip closes with b-roll of a newspaper street vendor, concluding that he “isn’t worried about being out of a job.” But as the anchor reports, it cost $5 per hour to access the network (above marginal cost, by the way) and took 2 hours to download the paper; this means a price some fifty times higher than the dead-tree edition.

Some of the folks we’ll be talking to are Twitter veterans and may be looking to share their own experience or pick up a pro tip, others are new to Twitter and have recently opened accounts, or don’t have accounts but are eager to learn. But then there are the folks, a bit older I have to say, who just aren’t interested.

Some are plain dismissive, in the “What do I care what someone had for breakfast” vein. Others seem overwhelmed and look at Twitter as one more damned thing they have to learn and manage. To them it’s a burden, not a benefit. Here’s a comment from an old post of Tyler’s on the same subject:

Personally, I dislike twitter because it becomes yet another thing that requires upkeep and saps attention from other projects.

There are only so many hours in the day, and I find social networks/e-mail/blackberries jarring and distracting. It outweighs any benefits I can imagine.

Looking back at what I first wrote about Twitter three years ago this month, I too was skeptical at first. Once I started using it, though, there was no looking back. It’s interesting that I wrote that I had “started to force myself to use Twitter to see if I can discover why people find it so compelling.” I guess only then did it seem obvious.

So how do one get skeptical folks to try it? Should one?

To the dismissive folks, I think the key is to explain that Twitter is a tool and it therefore can be used for good or ill. It can be used to only follow pop divas, or it can be used to follow the news, spread ideas, and have debates with other academics. I’m less sure what to say to the folks who answer, “Sure, but I already do that over email, research papers, op-eds, live debates, etc.” Simply answering that this is the new thing is not enough.

I think the immediacy of it is part of the answer, but that just further conjures up the image of another info-torrent one has to deal with. I think one way to answer is that just as Twitter has come on the stage as something new to deal with, mail, faxes, and even telephone calls have exited the stage. More importantly, though, is that Twitter is the kind of beast that doesn’t lend itself to an accurate personal cost-benefit analysis until one has used it. Its value is not easily understood from the outside.

So a little help, please. How do you take a 50-year-old who doesn’t use RSS feeds and get her to monitor a Twitter client? Is it even advisable?

I’m not trying to blindly defend the existing model of journalism, or at least the model that has predominated for the previous decades. Like Tim, I’m excited to see new modes of journalism come up, and I agree with him that for much industry and niche reporting, the new model is extremely promising.

I’m just a bit more conservative than Tim about proclaiming that old media is dead and that the value provided by old-school journalists relative to bloggers and other new-media types (particularly amateurs) is negligible.

First, let me address the topic of shoe leather reporting. I don’t think of reporting on presidential press conferences as shoe leather reporting; that’s stenography. Tim’s right, very little original information is generated by the marginal reporter in the White House briefing room. But I don’t think that’s the right way to think about what quality reporting is.

What I mean by “shoe leather reporting” is, for instance, Dana Priest’s discovery of CIA black sites, or Sheri Fink’s incredible recreation of the struggle for survival in New Orleans hospitals during Hurricane Katrina. (Fink is a reporter with ProPublica, which Tim rightly cites as going good work. But this article wasn’t published on their web site; it was published in the New York Times, and for a reason.) For that matter, look at the incredible work done by the heroic reporters from the Times-Picayune in the days and weeks following Katrina; there were no bloggers or desk reporters with the capacity or capability to do the kind of quality reporting they did, day in and day out. I’d be happy to see a whole mess of either real journalists at streamlined operations or amateur reporters do this kind of work. But outside of niche publications, I don’t see it.

As an aside, I’m not sure that Tim’s point about sports reporting is exactly correct. The Internet doesn’t lower the costs of the Times reporting on Blue Jays games; ICTs generally do that, and we’ve had the basic tools of remote reporting in place for generations. I’m not sure why, if newspapers didn’t hire stringers to report on pro games in the 1950s and 1960s, the Internet makes that possible today. If the Times sent someone to Detroit in 1955 to report on a Dodgers-Tigers game, he would have phoned his story back into the Times newsroom. So would a stringer based in Detroit. So I think the case that the Internet has reduced the need for traveling reporters is a bit overstated.

Second, I think I’m not as willing as Tim to just write off an old business model simply because something that looks better comes along. Recall that people have been doing that with the legacy airlines for two decades, yet they still fly. The Times is still a valuable brand, and it may be that what it ends up doing in a decade is substantially different than what it does today or what it did ten years ago. I’m interested in observing the evolution of this business (think General Electric) and the news gathering industry. I hope the Times and others are challenged by the sources Tim names, because competition is good, not because I believe in a teleology of newspapers where their death is certain and it’s just a matter of time. The bigger question is whether the newspaper industry embraces modernity or acts completely idiotic like the recording industry. And I see the evidence as leaning towards the former.

Third, and finally, packaging and appearance and form still matter, and for this reason I’m not as willing as Tim to write off the value of non-reporters working for newspapers. Getting the Sunday Times on my Kindle for a buck reduces my search costs for news, and for me it’s worth that price. I’m also in love with the Economist’s iPhone app, which reads the whole magazine to me on the weekend while I’m jogging. Again, that’s worth the price of admission (about $2 per week). If someone else will provide me with a weekly roundup of news from around the world combined with tempered (if cheeky) analysis read in a lovely English accent at a lower price, then please let me know where I can find it.

I don’t think that Tim’s point any my point are mutually exclusive: Tim just has more faith than I do that the legacy news gatherers and sharers are relics of a bygone era and that suitable alternatives have already revealed themselves. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of taste for the consumers of news, and the more vibrant and varied a market we can have, the better we’ll all be.