Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Another day, another Romney edition

The new Huffington Post pollster.com model by Simon Jackman.

Maureen Dowd checks to see whose fingers are reaching up the butt of the GOP's vice-puppet.

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.

A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel's neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption ' it's all ominously familiar.

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq ' a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How's that going for us?

Yes, but now that the Republicans have a man with such unwavering positions as Mitt Romney at the top of the ticket, we don't have to worry that he might be swayed by the last guy to whisper in his ear, or rush off without all the facts on his side. Right? Oh, and did I mention I was selling bomb shelters?

Nicholas Kristof wonders if before Mitt Romney starts running the world, he might first stop running off at the mouth.

Diplomacy is a minefield, and Mitt Romney spent the last week blowing up his foreign policy credentials to be president. He raised doubts about his capacity to deal with global crises, and we were left hoping that if that 3 a.m. call ever went to him, he'd have set up call forwarding.

... He went on a friendly trip to Britain ' the easiest possible test for a candidate, akin to rolling off a log ' and endeared himself by questioning London's readiness to host the Olympic Games. ... Then there was the Romney trip to Israel, where he insulted Palestinians and left some Jews uncomfortable with stereotyping by praising Jewish culture in the context of making money.

Kristof clearly doesn't understand the vision and experience behind Mitt's foreign policy. If someone says something against the US, Mitt will fire them. Then he'll outsource their country to another country that will do it cheaper and never question our choices.

David Leonhartd tests the relationship between tax cuts and economic growth. Hint:It's about as good as the connection between eating chocolate donuts and winning the Olympic decathlon. Almost.

One of the first things you notice in the chart is that the American economy was not especially healthy even before the financial crisis began in late 2007. By 2007, remarkably, the economy was already on pace for its slowest decade of growth since World War II. The mediocre economic growth, in turn, brought mediocre job and income growth ' and the crisis more than erased those gains.

The defining economic policy of the last decade, of course, was the Bush tax cuts. President George W. Bush and Congress, including Mr. Ryan, passed a large tax cut in 2001, sped up its implementation in 2003 and predicted that prosperity would follow.

Leonhardt confronts Republicans, and finds that they all have an excuse why tax cuts failed last time, but are sure to do the trick in 2012.

Kathleen Parker blames this week's tragic events on idiots near and far.

Stevens was a great friend of Libya and of the Muslim/Arab world generally. The imbeciles killed perhaps their bravest advocate in the Western world.

And they killed him (perhaps in part) because of the actions of another imbecile in the United States. One lowlife creates an anti-Islam film that looks like a blend of 'The Blair Witch Project' and 'Keystone Terrorists,' and the unhappy Muslim world goes ballistic.

I emphasize the word 'unhappy' because it is no more accurate to condemn the Muslim world for the atrocities of a relative few than it is to indict America because one lowbrow decides to upload a lousy flick that nobody otherwise would watch or even know about.

A couple of other idiots are worth noting.

Mitt Romney decided to enter the fray, for which he has been variously pilloried and heralded. Put me in the pillory column. His comments condemning President Obama's 'apologist' foreign policy were premature, inappropriate and too politically motivated to be effective either as proper criticism or as a campaign maneuver.

Attempting to clarify, Romney's foreign policy adviser, Rich Williamson, subsequently asserted that events would have been different under a President Romney. Perhaps, but might we use the same powers of extrapolation to infer that 9/11 wouldn't have occurred if George W. Bush hadn't been president?

And maybe I'm an idiot as well, but this week I like Parker's take.

Patrick Pexton dusts off his omsbudmanning tools explain why the GOP convention got more ink than the Democratic event.

In ... opinion columns, editorials, graphics and photos ' the Republicans garnered more coverage by comfortable margins.

Pexton labors through the numbers in each category and finds that, yup they really did give the Republicans more attention in just anpbout every way imaginable. Pexton then declares job well done. Actually, I kind of agree. It's no wonder the GOP campaign got more attention -- people just can't help slowing down to look at a train wreck.

The right to use "dinosaur" to mean something outdated and out iof touch is nearby revoked.

Siemens has unveiled three designs for enhancing the aerodynamics of turbine blades. The first, DinoTails, resembles the back plates of a stegosaur and increases the area of a blade, adding lift and so power. It also makes them quieter. When air flows from above and below the trailing edge of a turbine blade meet, they create turbulence, which can increase drag and make it noisy. The DinoTails' serrated edge breaks up that flow, reducing the turbulence.

Stegosarus wasn't a very brainy dinosaur but apparently it still has lessons for modern engineers,