As always, it’s hard to defend Romney. Here’s his response to the stupid Newsweek cover:

“They tried that in George Herbert Walker Bush. He was a pretty great President and anything but,” said Romney in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.

George H.W. Bush was “a pretty great president”? Really? I’d like to see Romney’s personal ranking of U.S. presidents because I can’t imagine any reading of U.S. history in which H.W. Bush clocks in as “pretty great.”

Of course, Romney might just be bar-setting for himself down the road I guess.

A couple of friends of mine have been working on a new venture, a women’s lifestyle magazine called Verily. I just got a peek at their first issue and I’m kind of blown away.

This isn’t a mag for me (obviously) but it’s insanely ambitious. Beautiful to look at, elegant layout, and an editorial voice that’s pitched at grown-ups. I really hope Verily makes it; it sure looks like it deserves to.

So if you’re interested, or know someone who might be, have them take a gander at VerilyMag.com.

So awesome.

This much:

I’ve made a habit of arguing that Mitt Romney has plenty of problems as a political commodity, but the notion that he has a “wimp” problem is just ludicrous.

Leave aside the empirical matter of whether or not Romney is a wimp. None of his political liabilities have to do with perceptions of wimpiness. If you wanted to take the worst, darkest view of his record and his persona you might argue that he’s craven, ambitious, mercenary, and grasping. If you took the most sunny view of those same characteristics you could just as easily argue that he’s intelligent, measured, flexible, and focused.

But there is no conceivable reading of Romney where his problem is that he’s a “wimp.”

The only explanation I can think of for this story is that Tina Brown has been stewing over Time’s breastfeeding milf cover for months and was determined to one-up them on the traffic-bait scale.

Joel Kotkin and Virginia Postrel do some good work trying to make income inequality a topic that conservatives are allowed to be interested in. It’s an excellent start.

There are plenty of good reasons for conservatives–and all Americans–to hope that Mitt Romney is elected president. But there are also a few factors that should give conservatives, in particular, some concern. At the most superficial level, there’s the precedent in electing the wealthiest man to ever hold the office. There’s no reason to fixate on this fact, but neither should its possible consequences be brushed aside.

Then there’s the question of what the defense of that wealth might cost. For instance, it should not force conservatives into defending the idea that the pursuit of wealth is the paramount American ideal. Nor should it force conservatives to defend all forms of wealth generation as noble, valuable, and good.

This last bit is already something of a problem for many conservatives. We tend to react to the left’s general distrust of the free market by insisting that every market-based outcome is efficient, helpful, and wise. We tend to react to the left’s general demonization of wealth by insisting that every rich guy deserves his fortune and that all transfers of wealth within the marketplace are inherently admirable and optimal.

But we ought to understand that very few markets are actually free, that even free markets frequently produce failures, and that some forms of wealth generation may be–while perfectly legitimate–more about gaming the financial system than creating any intrinsic value.

Jacob Weisberg’s analysis of why private equity is problematic for Romney, for instance, ought to trouble conservatives. Some samples:

It’s not clear that private equity—like other forms of financial innovation—is good for America. You’d think that if private equity made businesses more efficient and valuable overall, there’d be clear evidence to support it, but there isn’t. Private equity firms earn most of their money through financial engineering. A big share of their returns comes from “tax arbitrage”—figuring out how to exploit loopholes to pay less to the government. Because interest is a deductible business expense, debt financing means they often pay little or no corporate tax. Private equity’s reliance on leverage can also magnify short-term earnings without leaving the companies they manage more valuable overall. One legal but dubious practice that private equity firms engage in is paying large “special dividends” out of borrowed money.  As Jim Surowiecki of the New Yorker has written, “These dividends created no economic value—they just redistributed money from the company to the private-equity investors.” There’s some anecdotal evidence that the well-regarded Bain has been a better owner than most. But there’s no real way to evaluate that either.

And then there’s this:

It’s telling that George Romney, Mitt’s father, made around $200,000 through most of the years he ran American Motors Corporation. Doing work that clearly created jobs, the elder Romney paid an effective tax rate that averaged 37 percent. His son made vastly more running a corporate chop shop in an industry that does not appear to create jobs overall. In 2010, Mitt Romney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on $21.7 million in investment income—around 14 times as much as his father in inflation-adjusted terms. This difference encapsulates the change from corporate titans who lived in the same world as the people who worked for them, in an America with real social mobility, to a financial overclass that makes its own separate rules and has choked off social mobility. The elder Romney wasn’t embarrassed to explain what he’d done as a businessman or to release his tax returns.

This isn’t to say that private equity is scandalous or that Mitt Romney is a rascal. It’s merely to point out that if conservatives wish to support Mitt Romney (and they probably should), it’s not necessary that they be stampeded into defending the entire “private equity” view of the world.

I’m reserving final judgment until I see DKR again, because it’s a really sprawling, ambitious movie. The word “epic” gets tossed around a lot these days and I wouldn’t consider DKR epic by the scale of, say, the Lord of the Rings movies or Gone with the Wind. But I’d certainly put it’s sprawling canvas on the scale of Godfather II or Casino. This is a big, complicated movie with things to say.

And I don’t need a second viewing to know that there’s a lot to like about it. Nolan found a really interesting story to tell and he got the characters right. He’s made another movie of ideas. The fact that I’m ready to see it again speaks for itself.

But it was immediately apparent that this movie has substantive editing problems. Especially for the first third of the film, the pacing is disjointed, the character development is mis-juggled–even simple cuts between scenes are often done clumsily. There are a couple scenes which halt to underline exposition for audiences who may have missed or forgotten–which is fine, except that it’s done inelegantly. As Santino notes, at various times the movie feels both bloated and rushed.

This isn’t to say it’s bad. The reason I want to see it again is to better suss out the degree to which the film’s strengths overwhelm this weakness. But I am pretty puzzled, for two reasons:

(1) I’m confident that in Nolan’s editing bay there is (or could be) a cut of Dark Knight Rises that has the same running time, but  has the engineering precision of a Swiss watch. All of the pieces are there and 99 percent of them are on the screen already. They just need to be shifted by small degrees.

(2) The editor for DKR is Lee Smith, Nolan’s long-time collaborator who, among other triumphs, edited Inception which, for my money has the highest degree of difficulty of any movie I’ve ever seen. And Smith absolutely nailed that flick. It’s an unbelievable accomplishment.

The bizarre sense I had through much of DKR (especially the first third) was that Nolan had somehow failed to get his arms all the way around the project. That’s the last thing I expected. The best metaphor I could think of was a spectacular juggling catch in football–only that, when put under review, it turns out the receiver never quite had control of the ball before he fell out of the end zone.

I’m not trying to poor-mouth the movie. By all means, see Dark Knight Rises, on the biggest screen you can find. And I hope it blows your skirt up.

One final thought, about the shooting in Colorado: It’s terrible, of course. Really and truly evil. But what next? Will we have magnatometers at the cineplex the way we do at airports and some schools? I don’t know the answer to this. But I do know that if I was a Hollywood executive this incident would scare me more than piracy and streaming and every other aspect of the digital revolution rolled up into one. If the movie-going experience becomes fraught–either with worry about psychos or the unpleasantness of a TSA-like regime–that would be biggest blow the industry has ever suffered.

I assume the smart people in the industry have already put a lot of thought into this question, especially after 9/11. But I have know idea what the good answers are, except to pray that it doesn’t happen again.

Update: I’ll be collecting more detailed thoughts on DKR for a biggish piece that probably won’t run for a couple weeks so that I’m able to talk about the film’s plot in detail.

Tamp. That. Down.