Althouse

 Asks Daniel Drezner (at Politico).

This nascent alliance feeds into an American predilection for lumping all U.S. adversaries into the same basket. During the heyday of the Cold War many U.S. policymakers assumed that the communist bloc was monolithic. In this century, parts of the foreign policy community have frequently posited that the United States faces an Axis of Something. 

In January 2002, George W. Bush called out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea in his State of the Union address, warning that “states like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” While none of these countries were paragons of virtue, neither were they cooperating with each other or with Al Qaeda. 

A decade later during the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney’s foreign policy warned about an emerging axis of authoritarianism. Romney’s warning was dismissed at the time, but over the past year observers from across the political spectrum have wholeheartedly embraced the idea....

"Some are driving several hours, only to find more empty shelves. Online, private sellers are gouging prices, marketing cans for double or triple their normal price, and many large retailers are sold out altogether. Since the shutdown of Abbott Nutrition’s Sturgis facility, other manufacturers have struggled to quickly increase production because their operations are geared toward a steady level of consumer demand, according to Rudi Leuschner, an associate professor of supply-chain management at Rutgers Business School. 'Some industries are very good at ramping up and ramping down,' Dr. Leuschner said. 'You flip a switch and they can produce 10 times as much. Baby formula is not that type of a product.' On top of the broader supply-chain issues that have emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, such as labor shortages and difficulty securing raw materials, the problem may be compounded by panic-buying, Dr. Leuschner said. Abbott Nutrition said it was doing everything it could, including increasing production at its other U.S. plants and shipping products from its facility in Ireland.... Some parents are researching homemade infant formula recipes on the internet, although health experts have warned that such formulas can lack vital nutrients or present other dangers."

From "A Baby Formula Shortage Leaves Desperate Parents Searching for Food/Some parents are driving hours at a time in search of supplies. Others are watering down formula or rationing it, hoping for an end to the shortage" (NYT).

Is President Biden doing anything to help? I searched the page for "Biden" and all I came up with was:

Republicans have seized on the widening anxiety among parents to blame President Biden, arguing that the administration has not done enough to ramp up production. On Tuesday, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, asserting that federal officials have been too slow to respond.

Is that the President's argument, that Republicans are politicizing something that he's helpless about? I suspect that if Trump were President, the NYT would craft its language to blame Trump. 

I'd like to hear more about the homemade formula recipes? I looked and saw things that I know my own mother followed in the 1950s, with the key ingredient of canned evaporated milk. The NYT article conveys a warning that "such formulas can lack vital nutrients or present other dangers." Can? What nutrients can be missing? What dangers are there? How about printing the best recipe for homemade formula? 

Breastfeeding is discussed in the article, but the NYT puts a social-justice spin on it:

The shortage has been a challenge for families across the country, but it is especially palpable at grocery stores and food banks in San Antonio, a Latino-majority city in South Texas where many mothers lack health insurance and work at low-wage jobs that give them little opportunity to breastfeed.

You'd think that would activate Biden and the Democrats! 

"... clinching the votes Jackson needs to secure confirmation later this week to become high court’s 116th justice — and its first Black woman."

WaPo reports.

1. Mitt Romney: "We're seeing a small, feral-eyed man who was trying to shape the world in the image where, once again, Russia would be an empire, and that's not going to happen."

2. Maureen Dowd: "As for Putin’s Napoleonic megalomania, perhaps the Russia expert Nina Khrushcheva summed him up best in a Vanity Fair podcast: 'He’s a small man of five-six saying he’s five-seven.'"

3. [TO BE CONTINUED]

Said Barack Obama, in the third presidential debate in 2012, quoted by Chris Cillizza in "It's time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia" (CNN). 

So many people took the cue and laughed at Romney, who had been focusing attention on what Obama had said to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev earlier that year: "This is my last election. And after my election, I have more flexibility." 

Obama's joke — "the 1980s are now calling..." — overshadowed Romney's statement, which was: "Russia is not a friendly character on the world stage. And for this President to be looking for greater flexibility, where he doesn't have to answer to the American people in his relations with Russia, is very, very troubling, very alarming." 

Now, Cillizza says: "What looked like a major flub during the 2012 campaign -- and was used as a political cudgel by Obama -- now looks very, very different. It should serve as a reminder that history is not written in the moment -- and that what something looks like in that moment is not a guarantee of what it will always look like."

How about telling us what you actually said at the time? Because you, Chris Cillizza, were part of the "political cudgel" that — passive voice — "was used." You had the ability at the time to be more than semi-conscious, and as a writer at The Washington Post, you had a responsibility to do more than cheer-lead for Obama, something more than glance "in the moment" and say "what something looks like." 

It was time at the time to say who was right and wrong! And here's what you said at the time:

Oh, the superciliousness of "methinks"! It looks so awful now — that supercillizziousness...

Here's The Week celebrating Obama and Cillizza's wit at the time:

4. The '80s called....

After Obama noted that, earlier this year, Romney had called Russia, not Al Qaeda, our greatest geopolitical threat, the president unleashed his other zinger of the night: "The 1980's are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back — because the Cold War has been over for 20 years. But governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policy of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s." Boom, "that '1980s called' line was the best line of the 3 debates methinks," tweeted The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza.

Yeah, "boom" yourself. I'm sure the zinger amused Putin.

Said Stuart Stevens, "who was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012 and who worked against Trump’s reelection in 2020," quoted in "Trump blows a hole in 2024 presidential debates/The RNC's move stamps former president’s imprint on future debates" (Politico). 

What is the rule change that is the equivalent of outlawing passing in football? What was Trump so bad at that it corresponds to "a football team that can’t pass"? 

What Trump opposed was the use of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which he accuses of bias, to set up the debates, so I think the analogy should be something more like a football team that believes the referees systematically favor their opponents.

Republicans have long complained that debates and their media moderators are biased against them — what Saul Anuzis, a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, called “a very serious frustration among Republicans in general, and many of the candidates in the campaigns, that we don’t necessarily get a fair deal.”

I pause my reading this long article and just search the page for "candy." Finding none, I decide not to plow through the entire text. 

ADDED: Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist when Romney suffered the most egregious display of moderator bias in the history of televised presidential debates, the thing that made me do the search for "candy." Speaking of getting your ass kicked in the debate! And now he turns around and trashes Trump for directly speaking out about the bias. I guess what Stevens wants is for Republican candidates to endure and just keep trying harder... or maybe enjoy the pleasures of serving in a party that is systematically in the minority.