text:
The Road from Ravenna
In the footsteps of the last Roman emperor
Ravenna grew out of the Adriatic marshes, as Venice one day would, built on pilings and tufts of land. It eventually became a major port, and a base for the Roman Empire's fleet. Julius Caesar gathered his forces at Ravenna as he prepared to cross the Rubicon. Because the city—surrounded by swamps—was so easy to defend, the capital of the Western Empire was moved there from Rome by the emperor Honorius early in the fifth century.
Ravenna was thus the scene of the Roman Empire's final act, or at least its final act in the West. The man regarded as the last in the long imperial line, Romulus Augustus, spent the few months of his reign, in A.D. 475–476, in Ravenna. He was, in fact, not a man but a boy of thirteen or fourteen. Because he was so young, people gave the name Augustus a diminutive twist—Augustulus, the emperor was called: "little Augustus." And because he was a usurper, installed by his father, a general named Orestes, people gave the name Romulus a pejorative cast—Momyllus, they said: "little disgrace." There was time enough in his reign to mint money—barely—but his name was so long it was hard to fit it onto coins. (Zeno, the emperor of the East at the time, did not have this problem.) But then Orestes fell afoul of barbarian mercenaries in his army and was killed. Romulus lost his throne, and a barbarian named Odoacer made himself king of Italy.
I had long been intrigued by Romulus Augustulus, in part because very little is known about him. The best source I've come across is a monograph titled "The Last Emperor," by Geoffrey Nathan, published in the journal Classica et Mediaevalia in 1992. It seems fitting, almost suspicious, that someone with the same name as Rome's founder, Romulus, should preside over the empire's end. (Imagine if the demise of America were to occur under a president named George.) I had also long wondered about Ravenna's surprisingly low profile. I've frequently heard friends talk about visiting relatively small cities in Italy—Lucca, Siena, Ferrara, Assisi—but had never heard anyone mention even a toe touch in Ravenna. Was there something wrong with it? In resolving earlier this year to undertake a "Fall of Rome Tour," I was fully prepared to enter Ravenna and come to a grim understanding: "Oh. I see. The oil refineries." Or the hog farms. Or the paper mills.
Not to worry! Stepping off the train at Ravenna in June, I was engulfed by the fragrance of honeysuckle, which hung over the entire city, and still seems to linger in my clothes. The ride from Bologna had taken an hour, across flat open country, a Mediterranean East Anglia. The swamps are mostly gone now, the land drained and reclaimed, crisscrossed with channels and weirs. The train had been filled mainly with young people carrying towels and knapsacks. Ravenna's centro storico is no longer a port—it's all dry land—but a string of fine beaches lies along what is now the coast, a twenty-minute bus ride away.
That's not what should bring you to Ravenna, though. The real draw is the sixth-century architecture and mosaics. In its prime, when Ravenna was the capital of the Western Empire and then of the Ostrogothic kingdom of Theodoric (who unseated Odoacer), the city straddled Eastern and Western sensibilities. It's part Roman, part Byzantine. Its dozen or so major churches and monuments from this period are wonderfully preserved and situated within easy strolls of one another. (And among them is a real surprise: the tomb of Dante, who died here while in exile from Florence.) Strolling is what you want to do. Ravenna has some of the lazy flavor of a Newport or an Annapolis, a compact, residential town of pastel homes and fine small hotels and enticing shops, and the elegant public buildings, Roman and Renaissance, are built to human scale. In June the cafés in and around the Piazza del Popolo had set up televisions outdoors to broadcast the World Cup, and no matter where you walked you were always within earshot of phonic fireworks—the cheers and groans of the crowd.
Romulus Augustulus would certainly have known the octagonal Neonian Baptistery at Ravenna, with its extraordinary ceiling mosaic of John the Baptist pouring water over the head of a naked and beardless Jesus; one wonders if the beardless Romulus, himself recently anointed, saw in the image anything ironic about his circumstances. (The sources do not indicate if he was even remotely self-aware.) He would also have known the small, cross-shaped Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Daughter of one emperor, half sister of another, Galla Placidia played the role of the colored cloth in a game of diplomatic and matrimonial Capture the Flag that ranged over two continents and four decades, ending with her death in A.D. 450. The mausoleum is plain brick on the outside: nothing prepares you for the mosaics on every surface inside, illuminated by windows of translucent marble. On the same property is the Basilica of San Vitale, built a century later and Ravenna's greatest glory. Mosaics again, but imagine the setting as the interior of a delicate octagonal wedding cake that rises in four pillared layers, narrowing to a brilliant dome.
One of the most charming features of Ravenna is that the English translations on the explanatory text in all the churches and museums seem to come from a single practiced hand, itself a blend of East and West: "The clothing was covered by rich coiffures, closed in silk hairnet with golden threads, and by precious footwear in black leather with baked golden decorations." And: "After Athalaric's death Amalasuntha married her cousin Theodahad, who killed her, being inspired from the conservative Gothic wing." There are shady nooks in parks all over the city, and the book to have with you is Peter Brown's World of Late Antiquity, a work of historical prose in the high style that explains what the Fall of Rome was and wasn't. It certainly wasn't the cataclysm of popular imagination, with fur-clad Teutons putting Rome to the torch. Leadership changed, but for most people in the empire, life in 477 was the same as life in 475.
Not for Romulus Augustulus, though. His life was spared, but he was exiled to the far coast, to modern Naples. As far as Professor Nathan can tell, Romulus left Ravenna with his mother, and probably a large retinue. The natural way to go would have been to take the great Via Flaminia—roughly the path of the current Strada Statale 3—south to Rome, and continue from there to Naples on the oldest of Rome's major roads, the Via Appia, which even then had been in place for 700 years.
Had Romulus Augustulus been to Rome before? We don't know. Because their capitals lay elsewhere, many of the later emperors spent little or no time in the Eternal City. (Diocletian had been emperor for twenty years before he visited Rome.) The first sight of the city, with its massive wall, would have impressed even a jaded teenager. Rome (like other cities in the empire) was not fully fortified until late in the third century A.D., when the security situation, in the form of barbarian incursions, turned ominous. Starting in 270 the emperor Aurelian encircled Rome with a wall; it is as much as thirteen feet thick and thirty-five feet high, and runs for more than twelve miles. Most of it is still intact.
The Aurelian Wall greeted Alaric the Visigoth when he approached Rome with his forces, in A.D. 408. Breaching it was beyond the barbarians' capabilities. Cities really were safe behind their walls, though they might have to endure what Alaric had in store—a protracted siege. Partly to see how Rome may have looked to the Visigoths, and partly in the spirit of Sir Edmund Hillary (Quia est!), I decided to walk the whole perimeter of the wall. Given the weather (Rome can make you wilt in a day) and the fact that I served as my own Tenzing Norgay, I conducted the assault over the course of three very long mornings. The first took me past the Via Salaria. Alaric finally entered through this gate, in 410, after the Romans had had enough and agreed to let the Visigoths in for a relatively controlled sack, lasting three days. (When the Romans asked what they could keep for themselves, Alaric replied: "Your lives.") Rome was sacked once more, in 455, now by the Vandals, and again it opened itself up for controlled pillage, this time for two weeks. A vulnerable feature were the eleven aqueducts leading into the city, hard to miss on their high arches and easily cut. But one of the eleven, the Aqua Virgo, was almost entirely underground, and flows to this day. Its terminus is the Trevi Fountain; you can see (and hear) part of the ancient aqueduct below the Sala Trevi cinema in an alley nearby.
The last leg—in every sense—of my circumambulation took in the Porta San Sebastiano, where the Via Appia begins its 350-mile journey to the heel of Italy's boot. Parts of the Via Appia Antica are closed to traffic on Sundays, and the stretch running south from the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, lined with crumbling graves and tall umbrella pines, and parallel to an aqueduct, is one of the finer archaeological walks in the world.
One hundred and twenty miles along that journey, on the Bay of Naples, stood the great estates of Lucullus, the general and statesman of the late republican period—estates described by Plutarch and supporting a way of life so opulent as to give rise to our own term lucullan. Modern Naples is dense, hardscrabble, chaotic, and unrelaxing, but redeemed by what's around it (Pompeii, Vesuvius, the coastal towns). In imperial days the bay area was a vacation spot for wealthy Romans. The naturalist Pliny the Elder had a villa here, in what is now the beach town of Miseno; it was from Miseno that he sailed to get closer to the eruption of Vesuvius. (Very bad idea.) You can still walk the sprawling remains of the emperors' villa on a hillside at Baiae, nearby; and you'll be virtually alone when you do. (For reading, bring Robert Harris's excellent historical novel Pompeii.) But no domains rivaled those of Lucullus. Gardens cascaded luxuriantly down terraces to the shore. Sluice gates brought the renewing sea into teeming fish ponds. Offshore follies floated on the waves. The quality and plenitude of food and drink were renowned, and served not merely to impress others. Once, when Lucullus was dining alone, a servant prepared a simple meal and was told by his master to go back and bring forth a sumptuous repast, as if there were guests: "Did you not know that tonight Lucullus is dining with Lucullus?"
In some diminished manner the Lucullan estate must have still been extant in 476, because Romulus Augustulus apparently passed the rest of his days there. The site is occupied now by the medieval fortress Castel dell'Ovo, on a headland, nearly an island, that effectively separates the tourist waterfront of Naples to the north from the gritty seaport to the south. Castel dell' Ovo means "Castle of the Egg" (or, as they call it in Ravenna, "Acropolis of the Female Gamete"). According to legend, the poet Virgil placed a sacred egg in a secret room underneath, and said that if the egg ever broke, Naples would be destroyed. Looking at Naples today, it's hard to say whether the egg is intact.
The Lucullan villa at some point gave way to a monastery, enshrining the bones of Saint Severinus; circumstantial evidence suggests that Romulus and his mother may have founded it. If this is the same "Romulus" to whom the Ostrogothic king Theodoric wrote in 510, then Romulus Augustulus lived for a good long while after being removed from his throne. He didn't have to worry about money: in a rare act, the barbarians who kicked him out gave him a large annual pension.
Sitting across from the Castel dell'Ovo in the breeze late one afternoon, eating a granita al limone, I wondered what Romulus Augustulus thought about during his thirty-five years on the Bay of Naples. I know what I would have been thinking: I'd sooner lose an empire than Ravenna.


text:
Chances are, you're probably pretty pumped if you land a job at Apple. But just in case you need an extra kick in the berries, this is the inspirational note waiting for you on your first day of work.
Sure, it's corny, and maybe more Pinterest or Tumblr-y than fits the most valuable company in the world. And who knows if it's actually Apple-official, since it's really just an Instagram of a sheet of paper with an Apple logo. But man, that's a nice vote of confidence on your first day at a new company. [Instagram via Ycombinator]

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Lava dripping like fangs into the steam.
Halemaumau Crater
Lava overflows into the bottom of the Halemaumau Crater
Milky Way over Halemaumau Crater
The lava flow looks like a question mark as it joins the pahoehoe delta.
Over the Edge
A big chunk of lava is about to go over the edge and into the sea.
Lava fish
A fish? Or reptile? Flowing into or crawling out of the ocean?
Tentacles of Lava
Ocean entry of the 61g lava flow on the Big island.
The Mark of Pele
Not a "Z" for Zorro, but criss-crossing lava in a steam plume on the Big Island of hawaii
Lava Mala
A chain of lava drips like beads on a necklace into the ocean.
See/sea drips
Lava drips into the ocean
Black Lace
Lava breaks out down the pali.
Great Balls of Fire!
Balls of fresh lava tumble down the pahoehoe and over the young plant life that's trying to establish a toehold.
Fire and Life
A lone tree in it's last moments before being consumed by lava.
Tree in Flames
The tre bursts into flames as it's consumed by the encroaching lava.
Embracing the Lava
The other photographer on the helicopter thought that this looked like a sonogram of a pregnant uterus; his daughter was pregnant, so he was going to make a print of his similar shot & gift it to her.
Lava Mandala
The old & new lava cycling together in a perpetual wheel.
Ropes & Strokes
Ropes of older lava meet the new flows
Another piece of art being created on Peles canvas.
Gaudis Tears
Gaudi would weep with amazement at the intricate, eerie beauty of the lava.
Lava Tube Skylight
A hole in the side of a lava tube lets us see the river of lava rushing by.
Wisps of new lava adorn the old


text:
For screen reader problems with this website, please call205-648-31242 0 5 6 4 8 3 1 2 4Standard carrier rates apply to texts.
12 Months Same as Cash
These knobs offer the option to transform the appearance of the range or cooktop, giving it an all stainless steel, professional look. Replace the black, die-cast knobs for a striking change in appearance. This contains 8 stainless knobs.
|Shipping Weight:


text:
Ghost hunters return to Marblehead's Fort Sewall
Historic landmark declared town's 'most haunted location'
Determined to suss out possible paranormal activities at Marblehead's Fort Sewall, two ghost hunters spent Halloween eve investigating the historic seaside site, Wicked Local reported.
The six-hour investigation at the fort was the first for "newbie" Miranda Arthur Smith, 24, a Westfield resident, and sixth for veteran ghost hunter Nick Smith, 24, a Queens, N.Y. resident and director of Crypto Paranormal Investigations, or CPI, a Forest Hills, N.Y.-based nonprofit that "conducts scientific investigations of allegedly haunted locations."
Smith's extensive, eerie experiences at the site have led him to not only return multiple times as he searches to explain what might be haunting the fort but also to declare it confidently "Marblehead's most haunted location."
Smith, whose family now rents out a home they own on Pleasant Street, spent summers during his youth in town. One day, he investigated the site on a whim. That initial hunch has led to a spooky fixation with the site.
In his previous investigations, which have spanned six years, he has brought to two devices of the many his team uses to the location: an electromagnetic field detector and a hypersensitive parabolic microphone. Those devices have registered strong EMF readings along with "electronic voice phenomenon" recordings, sounds picked up by the microphone that are undetectable to a human's ears.
Smith said he has twice captured a voice at the site yelling, "Help!" And another time, when Smith was alone at the fort, he said he recorded a voice asking a question, "as though a person were standing behind him."
"There's definitely something going on here," Smith said as he setup equipment for the night's investigation. "We just haven't collected enough data to prove what that something is."
He continued, "For me to really say something is paranormal, I'd have to have a few things happen at once, like a change in temperature, an EMF spike and capture something on audio and video -- all at the same time."
Then there's the holy grail: a full-body apparition, one that would materialize, walk up to an investigator and answer a question or, as in Smith's case, ask one.
"That would be the best piece of evidence," said Smith. "If you were to see it, and get a picture or video of it, that would most definitely mean you got a ghost."
Fort Sewall has yet to produce such a strong piece of evidence for Smith, but the multiple incidents over the span of years continue to hold his curiosity.
Smith's notion that the fort may be haunted is perhaps grounded in United States and local history. The fort, widely known for providing the USS Constitution with sanctuary from two British ships on April 8, 1814, has bunkers as well as underground spaces, in which prisoners had been locked up.
"As far as tragedy, like a violent death or loss of innocent life, at Fort Sewall, we don't know, but that may not always create a haunting or leave paranormal activity in its wake," said Smith, explaining that was one of the reasons for the Halloween eve visit.
Smith often finds himself talking about his investigations using hypothetical questions rather than making definitive declarations. One hypothesis he has about the identity of a "possible" ghost is that it "could be" pirate John Lambert, whom judge Samuel Sewall, the man for whom the fort is named, sentenced to death.
In a follow up email Monday, Nov. 4, Smith explained he and Miranda had stayed at the fort until 2 a.m., collecting six hours of video on five different cameras they had set up around the fort, along with over four hours of audio, but came away largely empty handed. Smith added that the night was not entirely unproductive, as the footage will be used in a web documentary they plan to post online soon about Smith's paranormal investigations over the years .
"We did not capture or record any anomalies on video, audio, still photographs and motion detectors," said Smith, adding that they did, however, get multiple EMF readings.
Smith and his team has investigated several Marblehead locations and beyond, including Old Burial Hill, "Screaming Woman Beach" at Lovis Cove and "Devils Den" in Gettysburg, Pa., where Confederate sharpshooters found shelter and shot at Union soldiers in the Battle of Little Round Top.
"There continues to be something at Fort Sewall that remains unseen yet measurable at the same time," said Smith. "Only through further research and future investigation of the site will any answers be discovered."


text:
With my husband back to work on ourbasement renovation
, I've decided to tackle another project in the house that's been on the back burner...hanging pictures along the staircase.
The reason I've put it off for so long is that I'm completely stumped about how to do it. When we bought the house almost 8 years ago, and gutted it completely, I dove right in to the renovation. But, I think this seemingly simple project is so intimidating to me because my friend and relatives will actually SEE it. If I mess up plumbing work the worst that happens is I have a leak and I need to fix it. If I mess this project up, the staircase will look awful!
What I do know how to do is measure the wall to be sure the pictures are in alignment. The most important tools here are a laser level and a chalk line. On most laser levels you have the choice of letting the laser level itself or locking it into position. For this task, you want to lock it so that as you move the level, the line stays in place. Then you want to line up the red laser line with the banister and inch the line up the wall to the height where you want the bottom of the pictures to rest. While you hold the laser, grab someone to snap a chalk line on top of the laser line. Now you know where to place the pictures so they're all aligned at the same angle as the banister.
More From Good Housekeeping
As to the artistic decisions, I've asked lots of friends and design experts and what I hear again and again is to keep all the mats the same so the focus is on the pictures and not on the frames and/or the mats. While this is great advice, it doesn't help me out when it comes to selecting frames and deciding how to arrange them on the wall. More than once I've hit "pause" on my DVR while I'm watching Modern Family, because the pictures lining the staircase in Claire's house look so good even though she (well actually the set designer) has used all types and sizes of frames.
Do you have pictures going up the wall opposite the stairs in your house? I'd love it if you'd send me pictures to give me some ideas.
Be sure to check out Good Housekeeping's other articles on decorating: Kid's Bedroom Decor, Living Room Decorating Ideas, DIY Decorating Ideas and remember if you're in the NYC area come by GHRI and take a tour of our labs.


text:
HAVERFORD, Pa. -- The two day Centennial Conference Championship concluded on Sunday at Haverford College's Gary Lutnick Tennis & Track Center, and the host Fords finished in second place in the team race while winning gold in several events including three championship-meet records.
Johns Hopkins University won the team title accumulating 204 points with runner-up Haverford registering 138 points. Dickinson College was third with 104 points.
The day began early with the final three events of the two-day men's heptathlon. The Fords' Jeffrey Ainsley got the ball rolling -- quickly -- by racing to a school record in the 60-meter hurdle event in the heptathlon, posting a first-place time of 8.42 seconds.
Ainsley was second in the final two events, the pole vault and the 1,000-meter run, finishing with a two-day total of 4,482 points which breaks the school record he set earlier this season. Ainsley's record numbers fell just shy of a heptathlon victory Sunday as Hopkins' Michael Spadoro earned the gold with 4,552 points.
Ainsley's day wasn't over, though, as he also competed in the high jump, 60m high hurdles, and the 200-meter dash. The sophomore won the hurdles in 8.61 and was fourth in the high jump, clearing a best height of 1.85 meters (6- 3/4). He finished sixth (23.44) in the 200.
The distance medley relay opened the afternoon portion of the schedule and Haverford's quartet of Soren Rasmussen, Cormac Rada, Chris Gardner and Sam Fujimori powered to a winning time of 10 minutes, 29.87 seconds, breaking the first of three meet records on the day for the Fords.
Shortly thereafter, Charlie Marquardt set a meet record in winning the mile run for Haverford. Marquardt clocked a first-place time of 4:14.03 and was joined in the top eight by teammates Michael Brier (sixth, 4:28.24) and Brian Sokas (seventh, 4:28.70).
Jonathan Yellets kept the winning ways going for the Fords as he won the 400 in a time of 51.52 seconds.
After Ainsley's hurdles win Marquardt was back on the oval, this time in the 800 where he and Gebby Keny earned top-eight places to add to Haverford's point total. Marquardt was fourth (1:56.38) and Keny was sixth (1:58.99).
Yellets joined Ainsley in the 200 with Yellets edging out his teammate for a third-place time of 23.16.
Haverford fell 0.02 seconds away from sweeping the final individual event on the schedule, the 3,000.
Christopher Stadler -- Saturday's winner of the 5,000, in meet-record time -- made it two in a row, winning the 3,000 with a meet-record time of 8:33.12. Avi Bregman (8:35.27) gave the Fords a 1-2 finish with the Fords' David Roza coming in fourth, a hair's breath behind Hopkins' Max Robinson who was third in a time of 8:38.88.
The final two events of the day were a pair of relays, the 4x800 and 4x400.
Marquardt anchored the 4x800 for Haverford and made a pass entering the final turn of the race to take over the lead, then held off Franklin & Marshall College's anchor to win the event in a meet-record time of 7:55.59. Keny, Rada and Rasmussen preceded Marquardt in the gold-medal winning relay.
Dorvil Gabriel, Gardner, Alex Frost and Sam Callon closed out the meet for the Fords with a sixth-place finish in the 4x400.


text:
You know, when Greg McGarity gets off his my precioussss shtick, and talks about the nuts and bolts, the lack of a rush to fill Mark Richt's Christmas stocking with an indoor practice facility is a rational call. I mean, when you get down to it, here's the reality:
4. The football team wouldn't use it that much for actual practice
The reason there hasn't been much urgency is that the Bulldogs don't actually have to cancel practice or bus to Flowery Branch that much. Every time it happens it looks bad to not have a facility, but it happens infrequently enough that the administration has to weigh that against the cost.
"You can count on your hands how many times we would have needed it this year. You can probably count it on one hand. Two days against Tech. Probably the first day of bowl practice," McGarity said. "So that's a significant investment for something that is used infrequently."
Ten million bucks to relieve the head coach of less than five days of inconvenience is a luxury. That's all. It hasn't cost the program a title (and remember McGarity comes from another program that won two national titles without having an IPF); I'd have a hard time pointing to a specific loss and blaming that on adverse practice conditions, for that matter.
My only question is why didn't he start with this explanation instead of "you want it, fans, you buy it"?


text:
Eva Longoria Reveals Her New Man
Eva Longoria has a new man in her life: Ready for Love star Ernesto Arguello.
Back in April, rumors swirled that Longoria, who was a producer on the short-lived NBC reality dating show, was dating Arguello, one of the three featured bachelors. Longoria says they weren't together at the time, but soon romance blossomed.
Celeb couples: Can you believe they dated?
"I think that's why our relationship is so special - we truly started as friends," Longoria told People. "I guess we have the press to thank for pushing us to see something we didn't see."
Longoria, 38, and Arguello, 34, recently returned from a trip to Nicaragua where Longoria met the Arguello clan.
"Happy to share NOW that it's true! Couldn't be happier," Longoria tweeted about the news "Me too baby, I LOVE YOU," Arguello tweeted back.
Longoria was previously married to NBA player Tony Parker. Arguello and his Ready for Love pick, former Miss USA Shandi Finnessey, broke up in 2012.
View original Eva Longoria Reveals Her New Man at TVGuide.com
Other Links From TVGuide.com


text:
As AIDS has changed in the United States, so has the AIDS documentary. When the epidemic began in the 1980s, the disease was almost inescapably fatal, killing off thousands at an alarming rate; subsequently, the movies on the subject were heart-breaking, tragic pieces like "Silverlake Life" and "Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt."
With the later development of protease inhibitors — popularly known as the "AIDS cocktail" — the death rates slowed dramatically. And the story of how those drugs came to be is told in a new kind of AIDS documentary, the empowering and uplifting "How to Survive a Plague," which shows how a committed band of protesters challenged the system and won.
"Plague" takes us back the early 1980s, when a mysterious "cancer" was ravaging the gay community, wreaking havoc on people's immune systems before leaving them dead. In New York City, an ever-growing group of gay men and women and their allies began gathering to deal with the crisis head-on (in the absence of any action by the Reagan/Bush White House or Mayor Ed Koch), eventually forming the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and, later, the Treatment Action Group (TAG).
ACT UP quickly proved itself to be media-savvy, mounting a series of attention-getting protests everywhere from the White House to the Centers for Disease Control to St. Patrick's Cathedral. And part of that savviness was to film every meeting and every protest action, often with multiple cameras. (And this was back in the pre-digital age, when cameras were big and bulky and often accompanied by a heavy shoulder pack for batteries and cassettes.)
Thanks to that profusion of documentation devices, director David France has the opportunity to use cut-aways and multiple angles, a rare privilege for documentary filmmakers dealing with archival footage. The opportunity to edit within scenes of ACT UP in action gives "Plague" a great deal of its energy, but it's certainly not the only source of adrenaline.
Most of these activists were HIV-positive themselves, and through their efforts to be heard by the government and within the medical establishment, they were literally fighting for their lives. Over the course of the struggle we see people from various walks of life (former Wall Streeter Peter Staley, playwright Larry Kramer, student-turned-journalist Garance Franke-Ruta) educate themselves about physiology and pharmacology and the politics of health so that they could navigate the corridors of power and negotiate for real change.
Even those familiar with the history of the AIDS crisis and ACT UP may find themselves drawn in by first-time director France's storytelling skills, as he directly connects the dots between ACT UP and TAG's efforts and the creation and distribution of the cocktail while also letting us get to know a handful of the men and women so integral to this battle.
Whether your own politics relate to Occupy Wall Street or to the Tea Party, "How to Survive a Plague" provides a powerful reminder of the ability of committed men and women to agitate, organize and create real change in the world. It's a blueprint for fighting the power and an energizing, bracing encouragement for rabble-rousers everywhere.


text:
Thomas More Society
The Thomas More Society is a Chicago-based not-for-profit, national public interest law firm dedicated to restoring respect in law for life, family and religious liberty. Special counsel Peter Breen testified before the Indiana House of Representatives in 2015 on behalf of the state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. For interview requests, contact Tom Ciesielka.


text:
Together we'll solve some of the biggest problems in online trust.
So, let's see where you fit in. Discover why the best and brightest from around the globe choose to work at Trustpilot. Join our crew!
Hi. We're Trustpilot.
We don't mean to brag, but we're not your average review provider. We're a leading online reviews platform that's open to all businesses and consumers — yet independent of both — and we're committed to transparency and content integrity when it comes to customer reviews.
For consumers, we're a direct line of communication to the businesses that shape our world. For businesses, we're a way to learn from customer feedback and offer better products and experiences.
We believe in Trustpilot's mission.
If you're tuning in from the UK or Europe, chances are you're very familiar with Trustpilot — and if you're in the US, you're about to be. We're a tech company that's gone from start-up to scale-up at exhilarating speed, and we're poised to become an integral part of the new normal as life moves even further online. Today, every second somebody shares a new review about one of the +714,000 websites reviewed on Trustpilot. And tomorrow? Well, that's up to you.
In these times of distrust and misinformation online, our mission to become a universal symbol of trust has never been more important. Businesses can't just claim to be trusted — but they can build trust with their customers in a transparent environment with no pre-moderation or censorship.
We're built on friendship.
We asked our employees to share, in just one word, what makes Trustpilot such a special place to work, and the result speaks volumes.
The general consensus is that our "people" are what make Trustpilot a place unlike any other, and we're incredibly proud of that.
We want you to grow with us.
No matter where you are in your career, there's room for growth and ongoing support waiting for you at Trustpilot. Maybe you're ready for exposure on high impact, career-building projects alongside senior leadership. Maybe you want to expand on your core skills and take on a new area of expertise. Or maybe you've always wanted to experience life in another city. Maybe you simply want to learn from some of the best minds in your industry.
It's not too much to ask. However you see your career, we invest in a successful future for everyone at Trustpilot.
We walk the talk.
Our mission to become a universal symbol of trust is ambitious, and we know that to achieve it we have to walk our own talk of openness and transparency. To that end, we have a set of shared values that guide how we behave, make decisions, and approach all that we do. Our platform is built on them, and they give everyone at Trustpilot a chance to shape the business.
Always with integrity
We do the right thing, even when nobody's watching. What does this look like in practice?
- We stick to our word.
- Honesty is expected.
- We own up to mistakes.
- We look for ways to improve.
Open to all
Everyone is embraced and included for who they are, and what they bring.
- We want you to be you.
- We value diversity in all its forms.
- Everyone has a voice.
- Transparency is our default.
We work best when we work together. In action, this looks like:
- We put the agenda of Trustpilot ahead of our own.
- We actively help each other.
- We win and lose together.
- We hold a common belief in our mission.
Positively human
We are genuine people that create the Trustpilot family.
- Humans are welcome, egos are not.
- We connect and have fun together.
- We show respect to each other.
- Genuine over fake in everything that we do.
Subscribe for updates on vacancies
Enter your details here to be the first to know about any new career opportunities being offered at Trustpilot
By clicking above, you agree to receive emails or calls from Trustpilot about our products and services and accept our Privacy policy. Calls may be recorded for training and quality purposes. Unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email or emailing firstname.lastname@example.com.
Open positions
Want to learn more about our recruitment processes? Check out the different processes here:
Commercial and Corporate | Engineering | Technical (Product, Design, IT and Data)
There are 0 other positions open right now


text:
Question: How would I find out what my property is zoned for?
Answer: You can simply go to the St. Lucie County Property Appraiser's website listed below:
After accessing the Property Appraiser's web site you may search by property owner's name, address of the parcel or parcel #.
This information can also be found on the Fort Pierce zoning map.
Question: Where can I find information on the setbacks, maximum lot coverage, minimum roadway frontage, height or density allowed on my property?
Answer: This information can be found on the Planning Department's website under Land Development Regulations or by clicking: https://www.municode.com/library/fl/fort_pierce
You may also call the Planning Department at (772) 467-3729 and ask for the Planner of the Day.
Question: I need a letter that confirms the Zoning on my property. What do I do?
Answer: A letter can be obtained from the Planning Department at City Hall. You may call (772) 467-3729 for the Planner of the Day to assist you.
Question: Do I need a permit to put up/replace a fence?
Answer: Yes, all fences and walls shall require a construction permit. Our Planning & Building Department staff will be happy to assist you with questions about the style of the fence or placement.
Question: What are overlay districts and does the basic zoning district apply to those areas?
Answer: Currently the city has two overlay districts- South Beach and the Downtown Business & Entertainment District. Overlay districts are special districts within the city that are designed to keep the general character of those areas by adding additional regulations & guidelines to the existing zoning regulations.


text:
Gargantuan galaxy NGC 1132 -- a cosmic fossil?
The elliptical galaxy NGC 1132, seen in this latest image from Hubble, belongs to a category of galaxies called giant ellipticals. NGC 1132, together with the small dwarf galaxies surrounding it, are dubbed a "fossil group" as they are most likely the remains of a group of galaxies that merged together in the recent past.
In visible light NGC 1132 appears as a single, isolated, giant elliptical galaxy, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Scientists have found that NGC 1132 resides in an enormous halo of dark matter, comparable to the amount of dark matter usually found in an entire group of tens or hundreds of galaxies. It also has a strong X-ray glow from an abundant amount of hot gas – an amount normally only found in galaxy groups. Its X-ray glow extends over a region of space ten times larger than the 120,000 light-year radius it has in visible light. An X-ray glow that is equal in size to that of an entire group of galaxies.
The origin of fossil group systems remains a puzzle. The most likely explanation is that they are the end-products of a cosmic feeding frenzy in which a large cannibal galaxy devours all of its neighbours. A less likely explanation is that they may be very rare objects that formed in a region or period of time where the growth of moderate-sized galaxies was somehow suppressed, and only one large galaxy formed.
Many galaxies reside in groups that are gravitationally bound together, including our own Milky Way, which is part of the Local Group. Sometimes gravity makes galaxies collide and eventually merge into one single galaxy. There is strong evidence that the Milky Way is one such cannibal that has snacked on numerous smaller galaxies during its lifetime, inheriting their stars in the process. Scientists are keenly studying the environment surrounding galaxies such as NGC 1132 using space telescopes like Hubble, and they try to trace the history of the formation these galaxies by analysing their properties.
In this Hubble image, NGC 1132 is seen surrounded by thousands of ancient globular clusters, swarming around the galaxy like bees around a hive. These globular clusters are likely to be the survivors of the disruption of their cannibalised parent galaxies that have been eaten by NGC 1132 and may reveal its merger history. In the background, there is a stunning tapestry of numerous galaxies that are much further away.
Elliptical galaxies are smooth and featureless. They contain hundreds of millions to trillions of stars, and their shapes range from nearly spherical to very elongated in shape. Their overall yellowish colour is a telltale sign of their great age. Because elliptical galaxies do not contain much cool gas they can no longer make new stars.
NGC 1132 is located approximately 320 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus, the River. This image of NGC 1132 was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Data obtained in 2005 and 2006 through green and near-infrared filters were used to produce a colour composite.
Source: Hubble Information Centre


text:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22, 2012— -- (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): Good morning, and welcome to "This Week."
Game change.
AUDIENCE: Newt can win! Newt can win!
STEPHANOPOULOS: South Carolina shakes up the GOP race.
GINGRICH: We've proved here in South Carolina that people power with the right ideas beats big money.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Newt Gingrich pulls off a stunning and sweeping upset. But does he have a path to the nomination? Can Mitt Romney recover? Is the Republican contest headed for a long fight, even an open convention?
ROMNEY: Now this race is getting to be even more interesting.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Questions for our headliner this morning, Iowa caucus-winner Rick Santorum.
SANTORUM: Three states, three winners. What a great country.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And our powerhouse roundtable, with George Will, Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation magazine, Ron Brownstein from the National Journal, and ABC's political pros Matthew Dowd and Amy Walter.
ANNOUNCER: From ABC News, "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos. It's your voice, your vote. Reporting from ABC News election headquarters, George Stephanopoulos.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning, everyone. And overnight, it is a brand-new race for the Republican nomination. After finishing fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich surged to a strong win in South Carolina. Look at those numbers: 40 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney's 28 percent, with Rick Santorum third at 17 percent.
And in his victory speech last night, Gingrich struck a populist chord.
GINGRICH: The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half-century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system. And the reaction -- people completely misunderstand what's going on. It's not that I am a good debater. It is that I articulate the deepest felt values of the American people.
STEPHANOPOULOS: After congratulating Gingrich, Mitt Romney attacked.
ROMNEY: In recent weeks, the choice within our party has also come into stark focus. President Obama has no experience running a business and no experience running a state. Our party can't be led to victory by someone who also has never run a business and never run a state.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Yesterday's vote wasn't the only loss for Romney this week. On Friday, the Iowa Republican Party took away his eight-vote squeaker in that state's caucuses, announcing after a recount that Rick Santorum was the winner.
And we begin this morning with that candidate, Rick Santorum. He's down in South Carolina this morning. Thanks for coming out this morning, Senator.
Third-place win -- third place in South Carolina, not a win at all. And you're going to be facing right now enormous pressure from many conservatives to get out of this race so they can rally behind one alternative to Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich. Any chance you're going to buckle to that?
SANTORUM: No, in fact, a lot of conservatives are very concerned about the choice between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, because in their opinion and in mine, that's not a choice between a conservative and a moderate. It's a choice between a moderate and an erratic conservative, someone who on a lot of the major issues has been just wrong.
For example, the government-mandated health insurance that is at the core of Obamacare is something Newt Gingrich has supported for 20 years. The big bank Wall Street bailout, something that Newt Gingrich supported. Sitting on the couch with Nancy Pelosi during a very critical time when we were trying to fight off the cap-and-trade bill, immigration and a path to citizenship. I mean, these are core issues of the Republican base where Newt Gingrich is absolutely wrong and, by the way, Mitt Romney is wrong.
And, really, the race is a three-person race, and there's one strong, consistent conservative in this race. There's one candidate that can rally the Republican base, one candidate you don't have to worry about what he's going to say or do. He's going to, you know, criticize Paul Ryan's plan as right-wing social engineering. You know, his campaign staff's going to leave him, you know, en masse. This is not, you know, the old Newt. This is the last six months. So there's a big, big difference between these three candidates.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But, Senator, you've been making that case for some time right now. But looking at the exit polls coming out of South Carolina, among the voters who thought that electability, who can beat Obama, was more important -- there were a lot of them, 45 percent -- Newt Gingrich got 51 percent of them, Romney 37 percent. You were way down at 7 percent. And then of candidates looking for a very conservative candidate, a lot of those, as well, 36 percent, but Newt Gingrich gets almost -- more than double what you got.
So if you're not winning among the very conservative and you're not winning among those who want to beat Obama, what's your rationale?
SANTORUM: Well, look, we -- if you look at the numbers in Iowa, they were just the opposite. You look at the numbers in New Hampshire, they were -- they were tilted in a different direction. I mean, Newt put his flag here in South Carolina. It's a state that he knows well. It's a neighboring state for him. He spent all of his time and money down here. I spent a lot -- most of my time and money -- and certainly time, not money -- in Iowa.
And this is -- you know, these three races, in many respects, were -- are baked much more than the races going forward. And now we're going to have an opportunity for folks who haven't had the kind of exposure to the candidates that the three early primary states have, and we're going to see a very, very different dynamic.
George, there's one thing you know, that if you don't like the state of the play of the race right now, just wait until the next race. And we're going to see a completely different story. And that's the dynamism of this race.
So this idea that, because one person did well, Newt finished fourth and fifth. Where was everybody calling him to get out of the race? You know, we finished a very -- you know, we came from single digits in the last week and -- and really had a strong finish, a good debate. You know, we won Iowa, got really no bump from that because it happened the day before the primary.
There's a lot -- there's a lot of races to go. We're going to Florida and beyond.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I think this year you're right, expect the unexpected, every single week. I take your point on that. Senator, you started to make the case against former Speaker Gingrich in your first answer there, talking about him being erratic. At the debate on Thursday night, you said he was grandiose. Let's take a look.
SANTORUM: I don't want a nominee that I have to worry about going out and looking at the paper the next day and figuring out, what is he -- worrying about what he's going to say next (inaudible) you know, worrisome moment that something that's going to pop, and we can't afford that in a nominee.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you saying that Newt Gingrich is too unstable to be the Republican nominee?
SANTORUM: I think if you look at -- look, Newt's a good friend of mine, and I'm -- period. He's a good friend of mine, and I like Newt, and he's -- he's a brilliant guy who has tons of ideas. The issue is discipline. The issue is leadership.
If you look at his leadership, when he was in the House of Representatives, there was a conservative coup within three years of him becoming the speaker and eventually was forced out because of, well, you know, issues of being able to focus, execute, discipline, order, not taking -- you know, not doing things that -- that are coming out of left field. You see this repeatedly. This is not the kind of leadership we need to take on Barack Obama.
We have to have a stark contrast. We have to have someone who makes Obama the issue in this race, not the Republican nominee. If -- if the Republican nominee is someone that the Obama -- can -- can drop $1 billion on ads on top of and make him the issue, then we're going to be in tough shape to be able to win this election.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you like Newt, but you don't think he can be trusted with the nomination or trusted with the White House?
SANTORUM: Yeah, I think he's -- he's -- he's a high -- a very high-risk candidate. That's -- I mean, I've said that from the very beginning. Again, a lot of ideas, brilliant in that respect, but as far as focus, as far as being able to rely on him to come out and -- and deliver that consistent, strong message and not undermine our -- our folks in the House and Senate, not undermine some of the basic things -- look, sitting on a couch with Nancy Pelosi is not a particularly -- not a particularly solid conservative thing when you're out there, as I was, fighting this -- this -- this junk science of manmade global warming and cap-and-trade, and Newt was on the other side. This is -- this is the kind of behavior that we cannot have out of a nominee.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What about Mitt Romney? He may not have the momentum right now, but he does have the money, and his super PAC is already spending it in the big state of Florida, taking aim at you. Take a look.
(UNKNOWN): Barack Obama knows four facts about Rick Santorum that you don't. Santorum pushed for billions in wasteful pork, voting for the Bridge to Nowhere, a teapot museum, even an indoor rain forest. Santorum voted to raise the debt limit five times, increasing spending and debt by $3 trillion. And he even voted to let convicted felons vote.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And I know your campaign says you like to live off the land, but how are you going to compete with those kind of resources in the huge state of Florida?
SANTORUM: Well, I mean, we're going to -- we're going to run everywhere. This race isn't going to be over next week in Florida. It's not going to be over the week after when we go to Colorado and Minnesota and Missouri. Look, this is going to be a long race. There's going to be a lot of opportunities for the rest of the country -- I hear this all the time -- why should three states decide who our nominee is? Well, in this race, it's not going to happen. In this race, we're going to have a long campaign, Florida will have its say, you know, Nevada will have its say, and we keep going from state to state.
And I feel very, very comfortable that as people continue to focus in and examine the candidates, who's the best person to win -- you know, that campaign ad, first off, the felon part -- Mitt Romney even admitted that that was wrong. The second part, the spending -- there's been nobody better that -- in cutting entitlements and reforming spending -- those projects he mentioned, none of them were ever built. The reason that -- that we go through this process is to propose things that -- here in the federal level. And the states have a say as to whether they're built or not, and then none of them were.
So this is -- you know, this is the best he has. Why don't we talk about my record on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, what I've done on welfare reform and transforming the system? We've got the strongest record on spending, and I'm anxious to match that up against Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Where do you plant your flag? You mentioned Nevada. Mitt Romney is pretty strong right there. We know that Ron Paul is going to go play in all of those big caucus states. Your own home state of Pennsylvania doesn't even come up until late April. Where do you get your next win?
SANTORUM: You know, I -- to be honest with you, people asked me that before. Where do you get your first win? And we were able to pull off a big upset. Our feeling is that, you know, we go out and compete. This is a long haul. We picked up delegates today -- excuse me, yesterday. We're going to pick up delegates in the coming weeks. And we're going to have an opportunity, as states in this race evolves, we're going to have opportunities to win states. That's what we believe. We believe that our message is the best and that conservatives have and are starting and will increasingly start rallying around us when they look at the choices.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How big a blow was yesterday to Mitt Romney?
SANTORUM: Oh, huge. I mean, four days ago, George, he was 2-0, about to become 3-0, and this nomination in his and the minds of the media, anyway, was over. He's now -- I've beaten Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich has beaten Mitt Romney. The idea that conservatives have to coalesce in order to beat Mitt Romney, well, that's just not true anymore. Conservatives actually can have a choice. We can't -- we don't have to rush to judgment. We can actually look at the candidates.
The longer this campaign goes on, George, the better it is for conservatives, the better it is for our party. We stay focused on the issues, which is going out and taking on Barack Obama. The Republicans are the focus. I know why the media would love to have this race over, because they'd like to -- and the Obama administration, because they'd like to take aim on whoever the nominee as quickly as they can and start carpet-bombing them. I don't think that's going to happen, and I don't think it's a good thing that it does happen.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, it looks like it's going to be a long one. Senator Santorum, thanks for your time this morning.
SANTORUM: Thank you very much, George. Appreciate it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And with that, let's get straight to our roundtable. I am joined, as always, by George Will, Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation magazine, ABC's Matthew Dowd, and Amy Walter over here on my right, editorial director of the National Journal, Ron Brownstein.
And let's get right to it, George. Boy, what a difference a week makes. Last Sunday, Mitt Romney looking to do something never been done in Republican primaries, get a clean sweep, three in a row. This week, something else we haven't seen before: three primaries and caucuses, three winners.
WILL: Yes, the old pattern has now been broken, and that is, for five consecutive times -- beginning with Reagan in 1980 -- Candidate A wins Iowa, Candidate B wins New Hampshire, and either A or B wins South Carolina and the nomination. That's over.
Mitt Romney's going-in trump card was electability. If you go back now to his 1994 Senate primary, he's been in 25 races. His record is 6 wins and 19 losses.
WILL: Newt Gingrich won, it seems, at least 43 of 46 counties. He carried women and evangelical conservative South Carolina. He carried evidently all seven congressional districts. So here's what we now know. We all thought going in that the big problem for Romney might be his Mormonism. It might be the Massachusetts health care plan. That's not it. Mitt Romney's problem is somehow his Romney-ness, that is the fact that people are just not connecting with him, not just that he's the first candidate we've ever had from the financial sector, which turns out to be a problem, because finance is, A, mysterious and, B, disliked, but there's something about him that is not connecting.
DOWD: I think the most -- the most consistent thing in this inconsistent race has been the -- Mitt Romney's inability to sell himself in this race. He came in this race as the establishment candidate. He came in this race that most people thought was the odds-on favorite. He came in this race, as we've presented argument, with the best organization, best campaign, and best money.
And as we've seen this entire process unfold, the problem has been -- maybe not his Romney-ness, but maybe his Mitt-ness, because he cannot sell himself as an authentic, competent conservative in this field. And now he's back to -- we thought they broke the lid. He's back to the 28 percent, 25 percent. And that's a huge problem. And it's going be a huge problem in Florida.
VANDEN HEUVEL: He's bleeding, because he has not been able to deal with the tax issue, with the fundamental unfairness that he is an MRI of, and so amateurish.
But George mentioned that we're seeing old patterns or we aren't seeing old patterns. I think we're seeing some truly old patterns emerge in this race, if you think we now have the surge of a street fighter with a history of poisonous politics.
And we heard very clearly in these debates in South Carolina a replay of a 2012 version of Nixon's Southern strategy, this playing on the racial grievances and resentments, attacking a mythic liberal media, attacking now Obama's otherness. This is very dangerous for the country.
And I know some Democrats are cheering because Newt Gingrich has historically unfavorably high ratings, but you have a party taking this country into an abyss of poisonous grievances, when this country desperately needs solutions to economic problems...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Those Democrats include those in the White House looking for Newt Gingrich. They do want him.
VANDEN HEUVEL: ... of this country.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you -- you brought up two points that really harken -- a big thing that led to Newt's surge this week, two debate moments. And I want to show both of them, and then we can talk about it. The first one, when he got into that tussle with Juan Williams of Fox after Williams suggested that Newt's talk about food stamps was insulting to African-Americans.
WILLIAMS: It sounds as if you're seeking to belittle people.
GINGRICH: Well, first of all, Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And then the night of "Nightline's" interview with his former wife, Marianne Gingrich, Newt Gingrich in Thursday's debate goes right after John King of CNN.
GINGRICH: I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office, and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate with a topic like that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Ron, we've been talking a lot about Mitt Romney, but we also saw this week in South Carolina the debates mattered a lot.
BROWNSTEIN: We saw the conservative opportunity -- Newt Gingrich from the 1970s was a back-bencher at the far reaches of the House who was, you know, talking in very vitriolic language to get noticed.
Look, the formula that had been working for Mitt Romney until now was divide and conquer. In Iowa, New Hampshire, in the national polling, he was consolidating the center of the party behind him more than anyone was consolidating the right of the party against him. That has now broken down.
If you look in South Carolina, evangelical Christians, strong Tea Party supporters, very conservative, voters under 50,000 and non-college Republicans, all strands of what could be called the populist wing of the Republican Party, Newt Gingrich got up to 40 percent among them by articulating, I think, that kind of core anger they feel at both Washington and elites in general.
And that's a much higher number than anybody was able to get in Iowa or New Hampshire among those voters. And so the risk that Romney is facing is that, even with Santorum in there peeling away a part of that vote, that you now have this kind of coalition, the downscale populist coalition that is mobilizing around Gingrich, Romney is still pretty strong in that managerial, upscale side of the party, but this is a race that could go a long way if Gingrich has the financial and organizational resources to harvest it.
WALTER: Right, and that's -- he has to have that. He also has to have the discipline. I mean, there is a reason that Rick Santorum came in and called him erratic and he called him a high-risk candidate, right? Because what we've seen -- while I think it's true that Mitt Romney has had a problem really being able to be consistent from -- from debate to debate, from primary to primary, so has his opponents. That's why we've had three different winners. And I think Newt has to do that, as well, if he's going to survive.
The other issue here, when we come to the issue of Bain Capital, and -- and the financial sector, and Mitt Romney's ability or inability to answer for it, you know, it reminds of -- it's not the crime, it's the cover-up, right? And that the issue isn't Bain. It's his believability, the believability on the tax issue, the believability that he can go up against Barack Obama and defend who he is. And that's where his real problem is, because...
WALTER: ... wishy-washy...
VANDEN HEUVEL: I think the issue is not Mitt Romney. I think, again, coming back to saying -- this campaign is giving us an MRI of the fundamental unfairness of the system in this country, and the impact of Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent, and the idea that income inequality and fairness has emerged as a central theme has brought Romney's problems -- his father -- never forgets -- his father, who filed 12 tax returns in 1967, paid a 37 percent federal income tax rate. We see the dissent (inaudible) tax system and the unfairness. And even when Mayor Bloomberg said we should...
DOWD: Let's go back to the debates and go back to what we see in this process to me. While there's been -- people have seen some troubling nature of it and some ways they've said -- I think there's actually -- in my vantage point, some great developments that we've seen in this process that we've not seen before.
First, debates matter. And that is a big difference in -- it used to be I'm going to buy a bunch of media, I'm going to pay a bunch of people, and therefore, I'm not going to have to have a conversation. So debates matter, because people are looking for an authentic conversation in this environment, which they don't feel they've had before.
Second, the idea that you can go and write checks to consultants and all that and hire media folks and pay for organizations.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Newt fired them all.
DOWD: Newt fired them all. And then we've seen the ones that have had the most of it haven't been the most successful in this. Rick Santorum wins Iowa with basically no paid organization and no money on television.
WILL: But saying (inaudible) debates, however, deserves a minor dissent. Conservatives and Republicans generally are saying, let's nominate Newt because for four-and-a-half hours of debates with Barack Obama, he'd be the best. You're talking about giving a guy nuclear weapons for eight years perhaps.
DOWD: Actually, I don't think that's why they're saying that. What -- what I think they're saying is -- what the voters want is a strong, decisive, authentic conservative. And what -- what Newt Gingrich has revealed -- and whether he's in -- his entirety of his life is true or not -- what he's revealed in the course of the debates and what Mitt Romney has shown is that Mitt Romney has shown is he's not a strong, decisive, authentic conservative, and Newt Gingrich feels and looks that way to the folks in the debate.
BROWNSTEIN: What Gingrich has been is not ideologically consistent through his career, but he has been consistently a partisan warrior. The Gingrich you saw on stage this week was the Gingrich who called the Clintons the enemy of normal Americans in the '90s or the language he used about Jim Wright in the 1980s. And that is connecting with Republicans.
I will have a dissent, though, from Amy, because I think there is more -- it's not only Mitt Romney's answers that are causing him the problems. The Republican Party is changing. It is becoming more blue collar, more downscale. They're winning an awful lot of white working-class voters, and Romney has always had difficulty connecting with those -- even in the first two states when he was doing well, he did much better among better educated and more affluent voters than he did with...
STEPHANOPOULOS: So did Senator Barack Obama four years ago.
BROWNSTEIN: That's absolutely right. And as he moves forward...
BROWNSTEIN: As he moves forward, that constituency is very challenging for him. Newt Gingrich beat him by a substantial margin, 18 points, among voters without a college education in South Carolina.
WILL: Ron is pointing to the Republican base. In the 2010 elections, whites without college education, Republicans got 63 percent of that vote.
BROWNSTEIN: Sixty-three percent, yeah.
WILL: And the question is -- now, it's not that Professor Obama is going to connect with those people any better than perhaps the man from Bain Capital, but the question is...
DOWD: And that's the thing about this...
BROWNSTEIN: ... by what he's saying...
DOWD: ... oh, Newt Gingrich shouldn't be attacking Bain, he shouldn't be doing that, there's going to be a bad reaction to it. It's the people that still thought the Republican Party is based on Wall Street, when it's based in rural America.
STEPHANOPOULOS: While we're talking here...
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... Mitt Romney seems to believe that it is his tax returns that are part of the issue. He has just announced this morning that he is going to release two years of tax returns this Tuesday, following Jeb Bush's call for him to release them before Florida.
And, Amy, this gets to the question I think a lot of us were mystified. You knew this question was coming all year long, yet you've seen a series of four or five different answers from Mitt Romney. Now we know we're going to see two years on Tuesday.
WALTER: That's right. And he has to be able to answer for them confidently. I mean, that seems to be the bigger issue here, which is, he puts it out there and then he backs up a little bit. And that goes to the heart of the problem, I think, we're all getting at, whether it's his Mitt-ness or his Romney-ness, the sense that there is not a core there and people can't hold onto it.
Listen, I think that -- that he can defend himself and his record and his wealth and his -- his record on Wall Street, but he has to look confident doing it. And he has to look as if he can do that with Barack Obama, not just in a Republican debate.
VANDEN HEUVEL: But last night, Mitt Romney abandoned the job-creation argument. It was really an argument for success and the ability to make wealth in this country. His job-creation numbers have been repudiated. His tax figures will now be raked over. He has offshore banking accounts via Bain. This is a moment not of populism in this country...
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... pays a full U.S. tax on.
VANDEN HEUVEL: But he has -- but he has now entered a moment which I think his team never anticipated. There was a smugness and arrogance about being the inevitable candidate that led them to sort of be unaware of the mood in this country at this moment, which is about a view that the elites -- there are elites in this country, that the government is rigged against you and that you need to find a way to open it up out of the special interest money.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How do you explain why Mitt Romney is having so much difficulty with this issue? What is it that he's trying to hide? Where does the discomfort come from?
WILL: You mean on the taxes?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah.
WILL: I don't know. We'll know when we get, perhaps, more than two years, because once you start from, "Maybe I'll release one year," then you say, "I'm going to release two," the call will now go up, "What's in the third year?" And if you release the third, what's in the fourth? So he's going to have to have a large...
DOWD: I don't think -- I don't think it has anything -- I've been with enough candidates, George, and you've been with enough candidates, and we've all been with enough candidates -- I don't think it's that he has something to hide. I don't think that's it at all. I don't think there's like, whoa, what's -- what's all this?
What I think it is, is a typical candidate that decides they don't think they need to do it. And in 1994, he said I'm not doing it, he never released them. In 2002 running for governor, he never released them. As governor, he never released them. He runs for president, never released them. He gets in his head, "I don't need to release them," and no matter what anybody tells him, that's the problem.
BROWNSTEIN: Here's where -- I have to give an anonymous shoutout to one senior Romney supporter in South Carolina who said to me Friday, "He can release his taxes before or after he loses the South Carolina primary," that basically, that once he lost, they were going to come out, and why not release them beforehand to give yourself a better chance to win?
But, you know, I think the -- where the taxes fall into a larger issue for Romney is the electability concern and his eroding performance on that measure, because he has looked so unsteady on his feet in the last two weeks. You know, we had this bizarre period through the fall and early winter, where the other candidates were really jostling to become the alternative to Romney and so were focusing their fire on each other, rather than him.
Starting in that Sunday before -- that debate the Sunday before New Hampshire, he has been in the crosshairs, and he has not done well. He had a very bad week in South Carolina.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And, George -- I mean, it's clear. And, George, they are banking on Florida being the backstop, big state, money can work for him there. Already 200,000 people have voted. He's been working the absentees. It's a closed primary.
But Jeb Bush -- I think the Romney campaign had been counting on Jeb Bush giving them an endorsement. He said last night he's going to stay neutral.
WILL: Yeah. Well, remember, we're going to go down the road and we're going to find, I think, Newt's not on the Virginia ballot. He may -- is he on Missouri? I can't...
WALTER: Nope.
WILL: He's not on Missouri, so he's not competitive everywhere. Here's a small sliver of a silver lining for Mitt Romney: All across the country this morning, people are waking up who running for office as Republicans, from dogcatcher to Senate, and they're saying, "Good god, Newt Gingrich might be at the top of this ticket." And that can't make them...
STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to stop everybody there, because we have to take a quick break, but I want to come back, and we're going to focus this question of where the Republican nomination goes next, also look ahead to the president's State of the Union. Could a third-party candidate -- the chances of that going up this time around. And finally, that Internet blackout this week that had the late-night comics buzzing.
KIMMEL: Wikipedia was one of 7,000 websites that went black today, along with Craigslist and Reddit, and even Lolcats, Lolcats. I -- I was unable to see any cats dressed like Hitler today.
That's when it hit you the hardest, you know?
COLBERT: Nation, now, you may have noticed today that some of your favorite websites, like Wikipedia, Reddit, and BoingBoing, have all gone dark, which means, Internet users, the blue screen of death you were looking at this morning, that's the sky.
(UNKNOWN): We all know about Solyndra, the White House e-mails, the FBI raids. Solyndra investors raised campaign money for Obama. The government gave Solyndra half a billion in taxpayer money. Politics as usual.
(UNKNOWN): Secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama with ads fact-checkers say are not tethered to the facts, while independent watchdogs call this president's record on ethics "unprecedented." In America's clean-energy industry, 2.7 million jobs and expanding rapidly. President Obama kept his promise to toughen ethics rules and strengthen America's energy economy.
STEPHANOPOULOS: In some states, the general election ads have already begun. We're going to get to that in a moment. But I'm back here right now with our roundtable, still a lot to talk about on this Republican nomination fight.
And, Amy Walter, I want to go to you. We were just talking about Florida. This has become something, I guess, of a must-win for Mitt Romney. One of the reasons it's so important, unlike all these other states, whoever wins Florida, even if it's by one vote, gets all the delegates.
WALTER: That's right, although, remember, we still are a long way from the 1,044 that we need to get to, to win this nomination. Listen, I think the Florida model traditionally has been -- well, it's a big state. You spend a lot of money. That's how you can win the state. And so Mitt Romney then goes in with an advantage.
There are absentee ballots that he's been organizing. He's been doing all the things traditional frontrunners do, except for the fact that we have two debates before those primary ballots are cast on the 31st. We have one on Monday, and we have another one on Thursday. So we go back to where we started this whole conversation, which is the role of debates in shaping these elections. So there -- you're coming off of a big win if you're Newt Gingrich, but Newt Gingrich I still think -- and this is the other -- the issue here -- there's still a lot of baggage here that Newt Gingrich has yet to deal with.
DOWD: And which I think -- in order for Mitt Romney to win Florida at this point, and he was ahead, I think by Tuesday -- the race will be tied in Florida by Tuesday. And if -- I did a little math last night. And people say, well, Florida's different than South Carolina. If you take the demographics and say Newt Gingrich gets exactly what he did in South Carolina, among the same demographics he wins by 6 to 8 points in Florida.
So in order -- Mitt Romney has to change the dynamics of this race.
BROWNSTEIN: But having said that, I mean, Florida is constituted more favorably to Romney than South Carolina. And the Republican Party, if you look at it nationally, as we were saying, it divides about in half now between an upscale, economically focused, more secular, pragmatic, managerial wing, the downscale, populist, evangelical wing. South Carolina clearly tilted toward the populist side. Two-thirds of the voters almost were born-again Christians. In Florida, it's only two-fifths. About 60 percent are those non-evangelicals.
And Romney did, we should note, still win them in South Carolina, non-evangelicals, despite one of the worst weeks that anybody has ever had. So there is still a foundation, but clearly it's cracking.
VANDEN HEUVEL: Now, these candidates, who are all across entitlements -- and Mitt Romney's signature issue is attacking Obama for his entitlement society -- I think forget that Social Security and Medicare are entitlements. I think they're rights. They're coming into Florida, where I suspect there are millions of Americans, including Republicans, as polls show, who don't want their entitlements taken away.
VANDEN HEUVEL: You know, but the debate -- could I just come back to what Amy said, though? Because we've been having a spirited debate here about the importance of debates. And I think debates have mattered in this election, which is great. They would matter a lot more if we didn't see those shadowy super PAC kind of ads, which, on the second anniversary of Citizens United, have to remember, they have been unleashed on our landscape in a way that has taken elections out of the hands of ordinary people and put them into...
STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the things we saw is that Newt Gingrich got hurt by the super PAC ads in Iowa, but fought back in South Carolina and his super PAC ads in South Carolina...
DOWD: I take an entirely different view of this issue, completely different view of this issue. I think everybody likes to say, "Wow, these super PACs, all of this money out there, and all these ads out there," they are very little effect in this race. Advertising -- television advertising in presidential politics, over the last 15 years, it's diminished in importance. And...
BROWNSTEIN: In the general election.
WALTER: In the general.
BROWNSTEIN: I think it's hard to argue it didn't matter in Iowa in the primary.
DOWD: Barack Obama outspent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas 3-to-1 on television ads and lost all three.
VANDEN HEUVEL: This is the Ground Zero year for Citizens United.
STEPHANOPOULOS: We're now looking at this -- you know, you look at history. Every Republican who's gotten the nomination, every Democrat faces one bad week where they just get trounced. And the question is, do they come back from it? Or do they start to bleed in a way they can't control? What do you think has happened to Mitt Romney here?
WILL: I think it's better to have your bad week now than later. It's good to have a bad week, because you find out how tough you are and who you can trust among your advisers and all of that. I think there's a reason you play spring training games. This is still spring training. So I think this on balance is not -- is far from fatal, and probably will be looked back upon by Mitt Romney as a toughening experience.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Is he still the frontrunner?
BROWNSTEIN: Yes, I think he's still the frontrunner, given all of his assets. But as I said, if Gingrich can find the wherewithal to organize the coalition that is around him, that coalition is large enough to contest this for a long time, because like Obama-Clinton, you have two wings of the party that seem now -- that seem to have settled on a champion.
But, actually, real quick, to your point about Medicare, I was at a Newt Gingrich event Friday in Orangeburg, South Carolina. He was asked about Medicare and what he was going to do to strengthen it by an older woman. And older whites are also now over 63 percent Republican in 2010. And he went through an entire answer without once mentioning that he would convert the program into a premium support or voucher program...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Which is his plan.
BROWNSTEIN: Which is his plan. So they're not entirely sold that they can sell this, either.
WALTER: I just want to bring up two issues, two points about Newt and his baggage. The first is, when we asked this question in the last ABC-Washington Post poll about a week ago, 23 percent of voters said they definitely won't vote for Newt Gingrich, definitely won't vote for him. The only person who had a higher number than that was Ron Paul at 26 percent. Mitt Romney down at 8 percent. So there is a core of Republican voters who are saying this...
WALTER: ... percent, though, also think that his past, whether he's -- as a historian or consultant is a problem.
DOWD: Take that one step -- and begin to sort of say, where are you projecting forward and what are we going to see in the general election to me? And the State of the Union, I think, is the beginning of the start of the real general election campaign in this race.
To me, this Republican primary and Newt Gingrich's support is reflective of a broad anxiety going on in society, which people haven no idea what the future looks like and how to get there. And unless you present a vision of the future and how to get there, which the president has not done well and he might do, unless you present it, you're open to people saying, "We need to go backwards." And what Newt Gingrich has said -- there was a time in America that gives you comfort and gives you a sense of warmth. Let's go back. Because without a vision for the future...
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... let me focus the question first on these primaries, because you bring up all the points that Amy just raises. Newt Gingrich has a lot of baggage. You talk to a lot of establishment Republicans who think, flat out, he cannot be the nominee of the party, yet Mitt Romney can't seem to get the love. So does that lead to a kind of situation where, as the former Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele said just yesterday, a 50-50 chance of a brokered convention?
DOWD: Well, I think what happens -- I think that is a little bit of a fiction, because what's going to happen is, is Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are going to pick up the vast majority of the delegates. And it's not like somebody can come into the process and say...
DOWD: ... and you have a bunch of delegates, and you have a bunch of delegates, you don't deserve to be president.
BROWNSTEIN: The process tends to consolidate.
VANDEN HEUVEL: Consolidate.
BROWNSTEIN: The process -- you know, and Rick Santorum -- like many previous candidates who were the third candidate in the race -- I think they're kind of like Bruce Willis in "The Sixth Sense." I mean, they're kind of dead, but they're the only one who doesn't realize it. You know, it's very hard to see...
STEPHANOPOULOS: He seemed pretty buoyant this morning.
BROWNSTEIN: You know, he does. And he will. And he can get his 15 percent or 20 percent. But it's hard to see what would allow him now to leapfrog back over Gingrich and become the dominant choice for conservatives...
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... Bill Kristol in the Weekly Standard saying maybe a draft for someone else. Is that out of the question?
WILL: Probably. We haven't had a second ballot at a Republican convention since, what, '52?
WILL: '52. In 1976, you had something like a convention that was on its eve at least a deliberative body...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
WILL: ... not a ratifying body. But with a proliferation of primaries, it's very hard to believe someone isn't going to get 1,144 delegates and win.
WALTER: And there's -- remember, we talked a lot about momentum in this and debates and fuel the oxygen for these candidates. Once Florida's over, we go to Nevada, and then we have this big gap. We have some caucuses in between there, but we have a big gap. The month of February...
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... at the end of the month.
WALTER: ... and only one other debate scheduled, scheduled after...
STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to pick up on what you were saying, Matthew. You talked about the State of the Union. Let me bring this to you, Katrina. The president is going to lay out what he called a blueprint...
VANDEN HEUVEL: A blueprint.
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... for how to get jobs. It's also going to be the first blueprint of his presidential campaign.
VANDEN HEUVEL: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What do you expect to hear? What do you want to hear?
VANDEN HEUVEL: I expect to hear -- and I want to hear -- themes that he sounded in his speech at the end of last year in Kansas, where he spoke about how this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class in this country, and began to lay out a blueprint for how we build a different economy and a vision for this country that is one that is forward-looking, that is tackling not just the fundamental income inequality -- that, again, movements have brought to the fore -- but lays out a vision for a different economy, one that is not about crony capitalism, but is about a democratic capitalism that lifts all boats.
And I think Matt is right that we're looking at a debate and a campaign and an election that could be about two fundamentally different visions of this country. We have a Republican Party that wants to take this country back, literally peddling recycled policies that brought us to the financial crisis we're still living through, millions living in economic trouble and pain...
STEPHANOPOULOS: George Will?
VANDEN HEUVEL: The president needs to speak to that and lay out a vision.
WILL: When Barack Obama comes out against crony capitalism, his slogan will be, what, "No More Solyndras"? I want to hear that.
VANDEN HEUVEL: We need an industrial policy not for the energy oil companies, but for green energy, George.
WILL: I would expect him to do several -- several things. First, I think he'll steal a plank of Mitt Romney's campaign by attacking China as a currency manipulator. Second, he has to choose sooner or later, and he might do it Tuesday night, do taxes on millionaires and billionaires -- his favorite trope -- begin with couples earning a quarter of a million dollars, $250,000? It used to be his position; we'll see what it is.
But most of all, he's going to campaign this year on his impatience with our constitutional system. He's going to say we can't wait, we can't wait for concurrent majorities in the Senate and the House and the president and the Supreme Court. We have to somehow override the Madisonian structure of our Constitution.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Ron Brownstein, is that enough for him, given the fact that this is probably the most unpopular Congress in the history of America? Or does that come back and blow back on him, people blame him for making -- for not making the system work?
BROWNSTEIN: Well, I think all indications are that at the core of the speech will be kind of a follow-up to the Osawatomie, Kansas, speech, and...
BROWNSTEIN: And it will be kind of an economic populism that will contrast I think very sharply -- you'll have a general election in which you will have the core economic populist argument versus the core cultural populist argument that Republicans like to make, on steroids if it's Gingrich, more muted if it's Romney, but nonetheless, you know, elites in Washington trying to run your life or it's economic elites who are giving you the shaft.
And I will say to you now, I think it will give you a great, fundamental debate about the role of government, but it will not decide the election in the end, because those last 10 percent of voters who tip these things tend not to see the world in those kind of...
DOWD: ... Barack Obama's successes that we've seen in the course of his presidency has never been, can he give a good speech at a good moment? And it's always been, can he give a good speech at the right moment, saying a projected vision forward, and then sticking with the message consistently for a period of time so the American people gets what he's saying? What normally has done, give big speech, give a few follow-ups, and he's on to something else.
BROWNSTEIN: And he's kind of sticking with this. I mean, they are kind of sticking with the Osawatomie message.
VANDEN HEUVEL: You know, one thing that gets lost in all of this is that the ball and chain on our economy remains the housing crisis. And the president, I hope, will not cut a sweetheart deal with banks. One hopes in this speech -- no, seriously -- that he will lay out the need for a fair investigation of the bank fraud that contributed to this housing crisis, because without a revival of housing -- and there are 10 million more foreclosures...
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... write down more mortgages...
VANDEN HEUVEL: ... he needs to put together...
DOWD: The president's credibility on this is so diminished. He's got a chief of staff that worked at Citibank. He's got a budget director that worked at Bain Capital. He's taken more money from Goldman Sachs than any candidate in the history of the United States. And he's going to give his nomination speech at Bank of America Field.
VANDEN HEUVEL: At Bank of America...
VANDEN HEUVEL: That is why -- that is why we need to take money out -- that's why so many millions of people feel this government is rigged against them. That's why we need to get the money out of the system from both parties.
STEPHANOPOULOS: All those points are true, but, Amy Walter, on the other hand, he's coming into the chamber at a time, facing an unpopular Congress, when there is a fair amount of good economic news at his back, at least the beginnings of it.
WALTER: That is true. But I do think that the frustration that most Americans are feeling goes back to the point that they want to see somebody who's going to do what he says he's going to do, which is I'm -- he can't just say that he's going to transcend all of this. They want to see some actual -- something that's really coming back for them, to them. They want to see somebody who looks more like a commander-in-chief than a candidate, and that's where I think...
STEPHANOPOULOS: You bring up an important -- commander-in-chief. And this is something we actually haven't talked too much about yet, George Will. President Obama on the cover of Time magazine this week gives a foreign policy interview to Fareed Zakaria, says he can't wait for the debate with the Republicans, thinks their arguments are going to go away. Is this going to be much of a factor in the general election at all?
WILL: I don't think so. In the first place -- as I'm sure Matt would agree -- Americans and presidential politics (ph) really don't want to think about foreign policy unless they're forced to by bad news.
DOWD: They just want it taken care of.
WILL: What they want of Iraq is out of Iraq. What they want about Afghanistan is out of Afghanistan. It's pretty hard to look at what the president's doing with drones and assassinating high-value targets and call him weak on...
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it's not a plus for him, you're saying?
WILL: It's not a plus -- well, it's not a plus for him, but since 1968, and the riotous Democratic convention, since the nomination of McGovern in 1972, the Democratic Party has been perceived as problematic on national security. I think he is largely immunized on that.
VANDEN HEUVEL: I was going to say that one thing we haven't talked about with these candidates, there's very little daylight between a Gingrich, Romney, Santorum. They are all drum-beaters for a war with Iran. And I think -- Bruce Laingen, who was held in the Iranian embassy in 1979, asks, how could this country, which is trying to extricate itself from two costly, bloody misadventures in this region, now contemplate heading into another war?
WILL: There is no difference whatever between Romney's position on Iran and Leon Panetta's.
VANDEN HEUVEL: I disagree. I disagree.
VANDEN HEUVEL: No, you have around Romney the neocons who took us into these bloody misadventures...
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... Rick Santorum talking about striking Iran.
BROWNSTEIN: ... I want to go back to your point from a moment ago, because I think it's worth it more than in passing -- you know, while we're all so focused on the Republican race, the economic news that has come out in the last few months, if it's sustained, may be shifting the ground overall in this race a little bit. Barack Obama was not Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush. He never fell out of contention, never fell into the 30s for any lasting period in his approval rating. He's hanging around the number 45, 46, 47, and if he does get a little economic uplift, the terrain of November looks a lot different than we're seeing right now.
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... Matthew Dowd, because this is where foreign policy and economics come together. When you talk about Iran, if you continue to tighten the sanctions, oil prices go up, and you're facing $5-, $6-a-gallon gas in the summer. What does that mean?
DOWD: Well, that's the big -- that's the big problem, the question mark we have for Barack Obama. And you're right. He has gotten -- he's not dropped below, but he's not at a level he can get re-elected today. The problem is, if we look at the summer and the trajectory, he wins. If the trajectory is down, he loses. And it's all driven to a large by Europe and what's going on, on the global economy. And that's what I think the Obama folks are worried about, is they have no control over what may happen this summer.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And the question is, does he get a surprise? Fifteen seconds, George.
WILL: They do in this sense. Saudi Arabia (inaudible) seems to be ready to supplement 2 million barrels a day to keep the prices down and arguably help re-elect Mr. Obama.
STEPHANOPOULOS: That's got to be the last word. This is a fantastic roundtable. Thank you all very much.
And coming up, it was 12 years ago that George W. Bush famously accused Al Gore of practicing fuzzy math. John Berman on how some things in politics never change.
BUSH: This is a man, he's got great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math.
STEPHANOPOULOS: All year long, we've seen the voters confound conventional wisdom, proving one more time that politics is a lot more art than science. But our John Berman is scratching his head over why it sometimes seems they need a math degree to keep up with the campaigns. It's in his close-up this week.
BERMAN (voice-over): What's the single most elusive skill in politics this year? Oratory? Leadership? Charisma? Nope.
OBAMA: It's math.
BERMAN: Really, it's math. Democrats and Republicans do it.
ROMNEY: I'll do the math.
BERMAN: And if you don't do the math right, you're in trouble.
PERRY: Oops.
BERMAN: Because 2012 is the age of algebra, the campaign of calculus, the great national contest of numbers.
BERMAN: Nine, that was a good number for Herman Cain, but 15? Problematic for Mitt Romney, especially when you're talking about a millionaire's tax rate.
ROMNEY: Closer to the 15 percent rate than anything.
BERMAN: No wonder he has the cash to make a...
ROMNEY: ... $10,000 bet.
BERMAN: How about Iowa? The Iowa caucuses might be first in the nation, but last in addition, the only state where Mitt Romney won by 8 and Rick Santorum won by 34. Hope they did better on the verbal part of the exam. They're probably saying, in the words of "Saturday Night Live"...
(UNKNOWN): It was my understanding that there would be no math.
BERMAN: There is math. There's always math. Good math, bad math, and...
BUSH: Fuzzy math.
BERMAN: And how you handle it can make or break a campaign. Just ask Rick Perry.
PERRY: It's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the -- what's the third one there?
BERMAN: Yes, there is that number three, three agencies and, say, three wives, which might be considered a negative integer, but through the little-known Gingrich theorem can be turned instantly positive.
GINGRICH: I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.
BERMAN: And for the Obama campaign, none of these numbers have greater consequence than 8.5 percent, the current unemployment rate.
In the end, fuzzy or not, all these numbers -- eight votes, 34 ballots, three wives, 15 percent, 8.5 percent, $10,000 bet, or three agencies -- do add up to something: 1600, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With the right math, one of these men will get there. Hope he brings a calculator.
That's my close-up on "This Week." John Berman, ABC News, New York.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And John's a lot better at math than I am. I'll be back to answer some of the questions you have for us this week, but first we remember and honor our fellow Americans who serve and sacrifice.
This week, the Pentagon released the names of 11 soldiers and Marines killed in Afghanistan.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally today, your voice this week, where you get to ask the questions and I take a shot at answering them.
The first one today comes from McCook's Underdog. "Do you think that Donald Trump will be a third-party presidential candidate?"
I don't. I think he may flirt with it for a little while, but there are actually some rumblings this week that he might actually endorse someone in the Republican fight, maybe even Mitt Romney. It will be interesting to see if that big South Carolina win from Newt Gingrich changes that calculation for Donald Trump. But I don't think he'll be a serious third-party candidate.
We also got a lot of questions this week about last week's interview with fake presidential candidate Stephen Colbert and his super PAC crusade.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you believe they are a full expression of the First Amendment?
COLBERT: Without a doubt. Do you not, George? Do you not believe that some...
STEPHANOPOULOS: I'm asking the questions today, Mr. Colbert.
COLBERT: Are you saying -- well, you answer one of my questions and I'll answer one of yours.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Briggette Sayegh wonders, "Were you honestly a tad irked at Colbert last week or did you appreciate the humor of the interview?"
I wasn't mad at all. You know, we were both staying in character last week. He was acting like a real candidate; I was doing exactly what I would do if a candidate were there giving those kinds of answers or non-answers to the question. It was all in good fun. Of course, Colbert also out to make a serious point about those super PACs.
And finally today, "George, what was the most surprising thing that happened to you during a political interview?"
Now, that's a tough one, because, you know, so often these candidates come in so scripted, because if I had to choose one, it would be this interview I did with President Obama just before his inauguration four years ago. We were about 20 minutes into an interview that sometimes had gotten contentious, but then in my ear I found out that Malia and Sasha, who had actually come to the interview with the president, were in the control room, and they had a question for the president. They wanted to know when they were going to get a dog. And that's where the president broke some news just a couple of days before the inauguration.
If you've got a question, send it in on Facebook, Twitter at hashtag #askgeorge or anytime on abcnews.com and Yahoo.
That's all for us today. "World News" with David Muir has the latest headlines tonight. Tuesday, Diane Sawyer and I will anchor live coverage off the president's State of the Union and the Republican response at 9:00 Eastern, 6:00 Pacific, and check out otusnews.com all week long for the latest from our political team.
Thanks for sharing part of your Sunday with us. I'll see you tomorrow on "GMA."