This is great: Mitt Romney telling USA Today–without being prompted, it seems–that he hopes Sarah Palin will get in. “She would make the race that much more exciting,” he said.

Oh yes. Goodness knows Mitt Romney craves excitement! He’s a lot like that rock-band, guitar-playing Jon Huntsman in that way. And he certainly appreciates having a subtle political mind like Sarah Palin’s as part of the national conversation. As he’s been telling everyone who will listen, the problem in Washington is that you’ve got all these career politicians. And at least Sarah Palin isn’t a career politician. In fact, she was willing to sacrifice her political career to avoid becoming a career politician. If Rick Perry wanted to be qualified to govern the United States of America, he would have resigned as governor years ago. It’s just a fact. Science.

This is vintage Romney–bald-faced political positioning done with utterly transparent insincerity. You can see the processors whirring as the logic board does the calculations.

Perry commands support from “conservatives” and “Tea Party.”

“Conservatives” and “Tea Party” have pushed RomneyBot 4000 to second place in polls.

Chances of victory for RomneyBot 4000 while in second place: .28746322017. 

Must add new candidate to split “conservative” and “Tea Party” support.

Palin 1.0 commanded intense support from “conservatives” and “Tea Party.”

Will engage developers to push Palin 2.0 module into campaign model.

Perry support will halve.

RomneyBot 4000 becomes frontrunner again.

Victory assured.

He’s like a particularly humorless Dalek, with Just For Men hair. (The fly-away look he’s been rocking must have focus-grouped really well.)

If you want to know why Romney keeps losing elections, it’s because of stuff like this. Voters can smell it.

He doesn’t name names, but his approach to movie economics is nearly unique among directors who work for wide audiences:

I think we should out people that are egregiously inefficient. There’s a lot of it. The studios… often their entire process is pretty inefficient, but there are a lot of filmmakers out there too that are just totally out of control, and I feel like “You are polluting the environment. You are making it harder for the rest of us. Because we all get tarred with that brush when you go out and you go wildly over-budget and wildly over-schedule, and are sort of flippant about it. Then the next person that walks in the door pays the price for that. It’s not cool.” . . .

So I look at it and I think, “Sixty million bucks is a lot of money.” And then I see a contemporary comedy shot in Los Angeles that cost more, and I can’t figure out why. So I’m always trying to balance the idea versus… especially after THE GOOD GERMAN. That was a frustrating experience just because I look back on that and… I misjudged the accessibility of that idea, or the level of interest in the idea of that movie, and I should have figured out a way to make it a lot cheaper. None of us got paid a lot of money; it all went into the art department. I look back on it and go “If the movie cost $32 million, I should have figured out a way to make it for $14 million.” I don’t know what that would have been or if it had been possible to do it the way that I imagined, but I clearly misjudged the commercial potential of that idea and I don’t like to…. it’s not that I don’t like to fail, I just don’t like to fail and then learn nothing. I feel like “Okay, I learned a lesson there. I’m not going to do that again.”

And [CONTAGION] frankly was born out of a process of my learning that lesson. Scott [Z. Burns] and I were about to go into meet with Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher to close the deal to make a movie about Leni Riefenstahl. They had the Stephen Bach book, which is very good. Scott and I had a really, really interesting take on this, like a very radical interesting take on how to do this, and we were supposed to meet to talk about the pitch, like “Here’s what we are going to do.” And suddenly I go, “I don’t want to do this. Nobody is going to go see this.” I go, “We are going to spend twenty-eight million bucks and two years of our lives, and nobody is going to want to see this, not even our friends. I’m not going to do it. I’ve done that. I don’t want to do that again. I’m too old.” I literally said [to Burns], “What else have you got?” And he goes “I want to do an ultra-realistic pandemic film.” I said, “Let’s go pitch that instead,” and that’s what we did.

Then, as an added bonus, he talks about the benefits of structure:

In addition to the rules that we set up about the writing, when we started to shoot I had my rules about what I was doing with the camera and what I wasn’t doing with the camera. The whole movie is shot with two lenses, basically an 18mm and a 35mm. Very clean compositions, very symmetrical, very unobtrusive, nothing that calls attention to itself, camera can’t move unless an actor is moving… I really wanted the style to be really, really simple. Not boring, but simple. Clean. I wanted every shot, every cut, to have a reason – nothing extraneous, no waste at all. If you pulled one shot out, then the scene wouldn’t work as well, and if you added one shot you would make it also not work as well. I was trying to be really rigorous about it, and I’m happy with that. I feel like it’s as efficient in its own way as the virus is. It’s moving very clearly in a certain direction.

I like having restrictions. I like having rules of things that you can’t do, and I see a lot of movies in which somebody has never had that conversation with themselves. I look at them and I’m like “None of this is unified. You’re just doing shit that doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. You’re going from this lens to that lens, the camera is moving, it’s not moving, it’s a point of view, but then it’s not…” I just go, “This is just incoherent aesthetically. And it drives me insane because I feel this is stuff you can learn in an hour. I’ve given lectures about directing in which, in an hour, I lay all of this out for you if you need to know it.” So it drives me nuts. This has become like the best entry-level job in show business, directing a movie. It’s crazy.

Galley Friend J.E. would know more than me, but Soderbergh might be Hollywood’s last artistic conservative.

Galley Hero Andy Ferguson reviews Tom Friedman’s latest:

As a writer, Mr. Friedman is best known for his galloping assaults on Strunk and White’s Rule No. 9: “Do Not Affect a Breezy Manner.” “The World Is Flat” & Co. were cyclones of breeziness, mixing metaphors by the dozens and whipping up slang and clichés and jokey catchphrases of the author’s own invention. (The flattened world was just the beginning.) The breeziness would accelerate into great gusts of rhetoric about “an America we could be . . . an America we once were . . . an America we can be again,” as though the author were poking fun at a slightly drunk Ted Sorensen.

In “That Used to Be Us,” the method has been slightly altered. It would be going too far to describe the writing as “subdued,” but its relative readability marks a break with its predecessors. How to explain it? My guess is that we can thank Mr. Friedman’s co-author, Michael Mandelbaum. A close friend of Mr. Friedman, he is the author of many normal, un-Friedmanlike books, including “The Meaning of Sports.” (“Delightful”—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times.)

And that’s the nice part.

Galley Friend N.S. sends along a link to this New York Times piece on the DC relaunch, with this passage highlighted:

RESPONDING to years of declining readership, DC Comics — the publisher behind Superman, Batman and other superheroes — recently reintroduced itself with 52 new titles, featuring characters and story lines that better reflect today’s diverse sensibilities.

But it remains to be seen whether that diversity will include more accurate portrayals of mental illnesses.

Or, N.S. quips, physics. But it’s nice to know the NYT cares about what goes on in America’s comic book shops.

An instant classic from Galley Hero Chris Caldwell:

The word Ponzi is on many lips just now. It may not literally describe the welfare states of Europe and America, but it is at worst hyperbole. In the United States, Democrats’ endless promises of benefits, Republicans’ idea that funding the state is optional—these amount to promises that if you, the Western consumer, just sit in front of the television eating Twinkies, the Chinese will work to supply you with the luxuries to which you’ve become accustomed, just like back in the days when the coolies built the railroads. China, apparently, views the march of history a bit differently.

The postwar European social model was viable for a long time, but it, too, has always required accounting tricks, and over time these became too elaborate to sustain. First, the demographics of the past favored the system, since the generation of those who would have retired just after World War II had been decimated in World War I. Second, the demographics of the future favored the system, too, as the unusually large Baby Boom generation paid for the generation born in the 1920s—unusually small to begin with and then decimated by another war. Finally, by the time demographics began to look more foreboding, the welfare state had been going on for so long that even people who should have been able to do the math mistook the status quo for a law of nature. They borrowed from the next generation, confident that some trick would be found such as previous generations had enjoyed. When that didn’t work, they cut the military. And when that didn’t work? Well, here we are.

With Pawlenty out of the race, Michael Bay has put his considerable talents behind Rick Perry. But it’s better than you think. The killer? The jump cut with the line “I’m just gettin’ started.” Ouch.

And this is from a guy who voted  for him:

Obama’s Middle East is in tatters. Utter tatters.

It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations of the United States. In the mind of President Obama, in fact, these are what have wreaked havoc with our country’s standing in the world. So what—or, rather, who—does he exemplify in his contacts with foreign countries and their leaders? His exultancy gives the answer away. It is he himself, lui-mème. Alas, he is a president disconnected from his nation, without enthusiasts for his style, without loyalists to his policies, without a true friend unless that’s what you can call his top aide de camp,Valerie Jarrett, which probably you can. Obama is lucky, but it’s the only luck he has, that there are nutsy Republican enemies who aspire to his job. Maybe Rick Perry can save him from … well, yes, himself. I wouldn’t take bets on that, though.

For those of you with iPads, I’ve just started writing a weekly column on politics for The Daily. If you’ve already blown the $$$ on a tablet, the extra $0.99 a week seems like small change.

Now, if only Apple would port the retinal display version they’ve been sitting on since launch while they slow-walk features out on the machine.