Looking Under the Rock of Abortion II

Awhile back I posted about the story of the Philadelphia abortionist, Kermit Gosnell, arrested for murder.   No one who read the story with any imagination could conclude that it was anything other than the tip of a very deep and ugly iceberg.   This week comes another story that is, sadly, all-too-similar:

Two doctors who performed late-term abortions in a Cecil County clinic now face murder charges. The police investigation began last year when police say Dr. Steven Brigham and Dr. Nicola Riley performed part of an abortion in New Jersey, then transferred the patient to Maryland to finish it. When the 18-year-old woman suffered complications she was taken to the hospital. Then, police searched the abortion clinic looking for her medical records, but they found something else in the freezer.

“It contained the fetuses, approximately 35,” a Cecil County police officer explained. “Some of them appeared to be close to full- term.”

Riley, who lives in Utah, faces one count of first- and second-degree murder. Brigham, from New Jersey, faces five counts of murder.

The indictment is sealed so details are limited.

Reached by phone, State’s Attorney Ellis Rollins would not tell WJZ if the victims are indeed the fetuses found in the freezer.

Late-term abortions are legal in Maryland, but WJZ has learned that prosecutors are planning to use a viable fetus law until now used only in homicides involving pregnant women.

The abortion clinic in Elkton is now closed but fallout from the investigation has already led to changes in the state’s abortion regulations.

“We have the least restrictive abortion laws in the country,” Md. Sen. Nancy Jacobs, R-Cecil and Harford County, said.

Thoughts as We Come Down to the Wire in Iowa

Here are my quick thoughts as we come down to the wire in the Iowa caucuses for the GOP presidential nomination:

1. It shouldn't matter as much as it does, and it probably won't matter that much this time.   Why exactly is it that we permit a small subset of Iowans to play a large role in the selection of our Presidential candidates?   The system has never made sense to me beyond the simplest of facts that you have to have some system for winnowing the candidates down to a manageable number.   This time I think it won't matter that much.   If Romney wins, the campaign is close to being over, because he's going to win in New Hampshire a week later, and his momentum will then be unstoppable.   If Romney loses, the campaign is still close to being over, for the same reason. 

2. Romney winning is not the end of the world.   Notice something?   That's the sound of the major gaffes Romney has made.   There aren't any.   That's pretty telling to me... as the frontrunner throughout, Romney has had a disciplined campaign, hasn't made big mistakes, hasn't had big turmoil on his staff, has gotten his name on the ballots where he needed it (Gingrich and Perry screwing up getting on the Virginia primary ballot should almost be a disqualifier... if they can't do that, how will they run the White House?), has raised a ton of money, etc.   Is he the perfect candidate?   No... I hate the fact that Romneycare takes away a big issue for 2012 on Obamacare.   But he has many pluses, including a spectacularly successful career in the private sector and an unblemished personal life (sorry Newt!).   Most important of all, he can beat Obama, which would mean a Republican in the White House with the likelihood of a Republican Senate and House, which means he would sign Republican-sponsored legislation.   And he would nominate conservative judges. 

Obama must be defeated; otherwise we are really really screwed.  We can't let the quest for the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.   Let's keep our eyes on the prize.     

3.  The Republican field is not as bad as people think.   People act as if the Republican field is terrible, simply because they idealize Ronald Reagan and think that none of these fellows is Ronald Reagan.   They forget that Reagan wasn't Reagan in 1980 yet either... he was an ex-Governor, B-movie actor.   The Republicans this time around whom I view as legitimate candidates include a very successful Governor of a huge state, Texas (Perry), a very successful former Governor of the most conservative state, Utah (Huntsman), a successful former Republican Governor of a blue state, Massachusetts, who also has very significant private sector experience (Romney), and a very conservative (and very pro-Life) former Senator of a blue state, Pennsylvania (Santorum).   None of them have any reported blemishes on their personal lives.   The field also includes candidates who, while flawed and unelectable (in my judgment) for various reasons, serve the salutary purpose of pulling the party further to the right on important policy matters -- I'd call them the "idea" candidates, Gingrich, Paul and Bachmann.    That's not too shabby.   (I said the same thing six months ago here.)

Compare the Democrats in 2008... a non-entity first-term Senator (Obama) defeats the ex-wife of a President (Clinton), with also-rans of Chris Dodd (quit the Senate in disgrace over his cozy financial relationship with Countrywide), John Edwards (indicted for funnelling campaign money to his mistress), Bill Richardson (under investigation for the same crime), and Joe Biden (enough said).

In short, I could live with a Romney-Santorum ticket (or Romney-Rubio or Romney-Ryan).  And I think that's what's going to happen.  

Girl of the Day - Rooney Mara

The Regular Family is back from our week-long trek across America to see the extended Regular (and some not-so-regular) Families in Omaha and St. Louis.   The dog is out of the kennel and biting and sticking his head in the sink; the suitcases are put away; the children (girls) are working on their Just Dance 3 moves, while the boy child works on his first album of acoustic songs on the new guitar.   All is right with the world.    Back to blogging!

Today's girl, Rooney Mara, is the star of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo remake, and I suspect she'll be a huge star very soon.   Another neat fact:  that's her actual name, which comes from the two sides of her family, the Rooneys (who owned the Pittsburgh Steelers) and the Maras (who owned the New York Giants).   

Here she is in the movie:

And here she is in real life:

Much better in real life, methinks.

Christmas is All Around

The Regular Guy has taken the Regular Family and fled the jurisdiction for the remainder of the Holidays.   Best wishes to all for a very Merry Christmas and a safe and happy New Year!

Chart Mania!

Here is a chart from Tom Blumer at PJ Media of the projected 75-year curves of federal spending and revenue.   It's not pretty:

Now here is the same chart with the dotted lines representing the "adjustment" that the so-called "Super Committee" would have made to these curves with its $1.2 trillion in savings from 2013-2021:

Again, our "leaders" are fiddling on the deck of the Titanic.

***

There are more great charts (albeit some are from lefties) at The Atlantic here.   My favorite is this colorful chart about the distribution of taxpayers:

Look at it this way... let's say I went to a reunion of my high school class of 1000 seniors (OK, it was a big public high school), and they distributed who paid for the banquet the way we distribute tax obligations in this country.   The cost of the reunion dinner was $25 per person at a not-so-swanky hotel convention room, or about $25k.  Under this regime, the top ten people in the class would pay almost 40% of the cost of the banquet, $10,000, or about $1000 per person for their rubber chicken.   The next 40 people would pick up the next 20%, about $5,000, so they would be paying $125 per person.    The next 50 people would pick up 10%, or about $2500, so they would be paying about $50 per person (for a $25 meal).   The next 400 people would be responsible for about 27% of the cost, or about $6750, so they would be getting the meal at the bargain price of about $17 per person.   But the rest of the class of my erstwhile friends, 500 people, people I went to school with, and played sports with, and lived in the same neighborhood with, those people would be responsible for only 3% of the cost, or $750, so they would be paying about $1.50 a head for their meal.   To them it's a great deal... they literally get an almost free lunch.  

But is this any way to treat friends?   Would anyone walk in there happily knowing that they are sticking some of their friends with $1000 bills, while they are eating the same food for practically nothing?   And, if they would, are they really the kind of people who we want to model our country on from a moral perspective?  

Girl of the Day - Winter Avi Zoli

The Regular Guy is now somewhat addicted to the biker drama on AMC, Sons of Anarchy.   One of the subplots involves the relationship between the Club and a porn studio, and the relationship between one of the bikers, Opie, and a porn star named Lyla Winston.   Lyla is played by Winter Avi Zoli (maybe the weirdest name in entertainment), who is not a great actress, but very attractive.   (Sort of like a porn star, come to think of it.)

Ron Paul on the Federal Reserve System

I promised I would get back to Ron Paul's position on the Federal Reserve, which is central to his economic program.   Essentially, he wants to "End the Fed," as a section of his campaign website says.   Here's the rationale, from an article by Paul in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago:

To know what is wrong with the Federal Reserve, one must first understand the nature of money. Money is like any other good in our economy that emerges from the market to satisfy the needs and wants of consumers. Its particular usefulness is that it helps facilitate indirect exchange, making it easier for us to buy and sell goods because there is a common way of measuring their value. Money is not a government phenomenon, and it need not and should not be managed by government. When central banks like the Fed manage money they are engaging in price fixing, which leads not to prosperity but to disaster.

The Federal Reserve has caused every single boom and bust that has occurred in this country since the bank's creation in 1913. It pumps new money into the financial system to lower interest rates and spur the economy. Adding new money increases the supply of money, making the price of money over time-the interest rate-lower than the market would make it. These lower interest rates affect the allocation of resources, causing capital to be malinvested throughout the economy. So certain projects and ventures that appear profitable when funded at artificially low interest rates are not in fact the best use of those resources.

Eventually, the economic boom created by the Fed's actions is found to be unsustainable, and the bust ensues as this malinvested capital manifests itself in a surplus of capital goods, inventory overhangs, etc. Until these misdirected resources are put to a more productive use-the uses the free market actually desires-the economy stagnates.

The great contribution of the Austrian school of economics to economic theory was in its description of this business cycle: the process of booms and busts, and their origins in monetary intervention by the government in cooperation with the banking system. Yet policy makers at the Federal Reserve still fail to understand the causes of our most recent financial crisis. So they find themselves unable to come up with an adequate solution.

In many respects the governors of the Federal Reserve System and the members of the Federal Open Market Committee are like all other high-ranking powerful officials. Because they make decisions that profoundly affect the workings of the economy and because they have hundreds of bright economists working for them doing research and collecting data, they buy into the pretense of knowledge-the illusion that because they have all these resources at their fingertips they therefore have the ability to guide the economy as they see fit.

This is very strong, persuasive stuff, particularly as it is founded on what I believe to be deep and intelligent reading in the works of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.   (The note on the "pretense of knowledge" comes straight out of Hayek, who, in my view, is the great economic thinker and philosopher of the 20th Century.)    I would still have concern that ending the Fed would cause severe dislocations in the short term that might keep us from getting the long-term benefits of a freer economy.   It would be a revolutionary act, and revolutions have a way of getting away from the people who start them and transforming into unpredicted monsters.   This is the lesson of Burke, the founding article of modern conservatism.   But the underlying premise  that we need much less, not more, government intervention in the economy, is sound and salutary, and we need more of that from Republican candidates.   And we're not getting it, at least not from Romney or Gingrich, the current front-runners.

Again, this is why the disqualifying oddities of Paul -- at least to me -- are so sad.   But for his past affiliations with the "crank" John Bircher right-wing through his newsletters, and his willingness to abandon Israel and befriend Iran, his ideas on the economy and energy, his stance on life issues, and his willingness to repeal Obamacare and protect our borders are powerful and important messages that any Republican should be willing to adopt.  

Birthday Today - Puccini!

It's Giacomo Puccini's birthday today.   Probably the most melodic of all opera composers -- the closest to Broadway, in other words -- Puccini's great aria from Turandot is what first made me even think of liking opera (I'm still not quite there, but I occasionally will have a spasm of listening to opera that lasts a week or so, before I revert to rock and roll).   Here it is, from the "Three Tenors" concert:




Wow.   Just.... wow!

Dorothy Rabinowitz on Ron Paul

Dorothy Rabinowitz, a writer whom I tend to trust from the Wall Street Journal, has an article up today about Ron Paul's attitudes toward America:

A grandfatherly sort who dispenses family cookbooks on the campaign trail, candidate Paul is entirely aware of the value of being liked. He has of late even tried softening the tone of some of his comments on the crime of foreign aid and such, but it doesn't last long. There he was at the debate last Thursday waving his arms, charging that the U.S. was declaring "war on 1.2 billion Muslims," that it "viewed all Muslims as the same." Yes, he allowed, "there are a few radicals"—and then he proceeded to hold forth again on the good reasons terrorists had for mounting attacks on us.

His efforts on behalf of Iran's right to the status of misunderstood victim continued apace. On the Hannity show following the debate, Dr. Paul urged the host to understand that Iran's leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had never mentioned any intention of wiping Israel off the map. It was all a mistranslation, he explained. What about Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust? A short silence ensued as the candidate stared into space. He moved quickly on to a more secure subject. "They're just defending themselves," he declared.

Presumably he was referring to Iran's wishes for a bomb. It would have been intriguing to hear his answer had he been asked about another Ahmadinejad comment, made more than once—the one in which the Iranian leader declares the U.S. "a Satanic power that will, with God's will, be annihilated."

There can be no confusions about Dr. Paul's own comments about the U.S. After 9/11, he said to students in Iowa, there was "glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq." It takes a profoundly envenomed mindset—one also deeply at odds with reality—to believe and to say publicly that the administration of this nation brought so low with grief and loss after the attack had reacted with glee. There are, to be sure, a number of like-minded citizens around (see the 9/11 Truthers, whose opinions Dr. Paul has said he doesn't share). But we don't expect to find their views in people running for the nation's highest office.

The Paul comment here is worth more than a passing look. It sums up much we have already heard from him. It's the voice of that ideological school whose central doctrine is the proposition that the U.S. is the main cause of misery and terror in the world. The school, for instance, of Barack Obama's former minister famed for his "God d— America" sermons: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for whom, as for Dr. Paul, the 9/11 terror assault was only a case of victims seeking justice, of "America's chickens coming home to roost."

Some in Iowa are reportedly now taking a look at Dr. Paul, now risen high in the polls there. He has plenty of money for advertising and is using it, and some may throw their support to him, if only as protest votes. He appears to be gaining some supporters in New Hampshire as well. It seemed improbable that the best-known of American propagandists for our enemies could be near the top of the pack in the Iowa contest, but there it is. An interesting status for a candidate of Dr. Paul's persuasion to have achieved, and he'll achieve even more if Iowans choose to give him a victory.

Again, there is much to like in much of what Ron Paul says, and in his personality and character and personal history.   But these sorts of attitudes are, for me anyway, a disqualifier for the position of Commander in Chief.  

The Payroll Tax Deal

The three main things that the Senate bill that the House rejected this week to much wailing and gnashing of teeth was supposed to do were:  (1) extend the payroll tax (read Social Security and Medicare tax) break for two months; (2) extend unemployment benefits; and (3) put in place a "doc fix" that will stall cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians.   The House wants its own bill, which does both (2) and (3), but also does (1) for a full year.   The transparent reasoning they're doing this is to push the next decision on the payroll tax past the next election, while the transparent reason why the Democratic Senate wants a series of two-month fixes is so they can keep harping on how Republicans won't raise taxes on the "rich," but want workers to pay more payroll taxes.

From the Regular Guy's perspective, this is all fiddling on the Titanic as it sinks.    None of the three things that either Senate Democrats or House Republicans are doing are good things, for the simple reason that WE DON'T HAVE THE MONEY!   Social Security is going bankrupt... why do we want to limit the amount of revenue coming into the program?   Unemployment benefits are costly and also disincentivize people from looking actively for jobs.   (Is there a connection to the steady increase in people who have dropped out of the workforce?   Of course there is, unless you have no understanding of human nature.)   Finally, we are going to have to come to grips with cutting Medicare reimbursements soon, so why not do it now?

Sheesh!  

Girl of the Day - Jane Fonda

I hate doing this, because she's such a stereotypical loony lefty, and her conduct during the Vietnam War was disgraceful and traitorous.   But it's Jane Fonda's birthday; she turns 74.   Looking back through The Regular Guy Believes' archives, here's what I said about her last year:

...today is Jane Fonda's 73rd birthday.   An execrable person politically, "Hanoi Jane" was the star of one of my favorite movies in the mid-1960s when I was a small kid first liking movies, the comic western, Cat Ballou.  For some reason, this picture from the movie captures how I feel about her -- an incredibly cute girl who actually probably needed to be strung up.

Barack Obama... the Fourth Greatest President?

It's almost unbelievable that Obama could be so tone deaf as this.   A smarter politician would have deflected the question easily, saying (as George W. Bush) would often say, that history would decide long after he was gone whether what he had done was good or bad, right or wrong.   But Obama chose to tell Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes that he believes that his administration's first few years have seen more accomplishments than any other President with the possible exceptions of Lincoln (!), FDR and LBJ:

Really?  Even on it's face this makes no sense.   Put aside the chutzpah of claiming to be a better President than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Theodore Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan.   As a matter of history this is extraordinarily shallow and silly.   What were FDR's foreign policy accomplishments up to December 1935?   I don't recall any.   And during the first three years of his Presidency, LBJ presided over the escalation of the Vietnam War?  Is that really what Obama thinks of as a great accomplishment?   Did anybody in December 1967 really think LBJ's Presidency had been such a rip-roaring success?   If so, it might be news to most of the left-wing of the Democratic Party.   And, as for Lincoln, at this point in his first term (December 1863), the war was dragging on, and there was serious doubt that he would be reelected, or that the war would be concluded victoriously for the North.   To be sure, Grant had just succeeded in breaking the Confederate Army at Chattanooga, but the carnage of the summer of 1864 awaited (the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, etc.).  

 

Obama '12:  I'm the Greatest... Just Ask Me! 

Still More on Ron Paul

Another reader wrote in to comment last night about my Ron Paul "weirdness" post.   Here's what he had to say:

[H]e has made some pretty off-the-wall comments which is why I think he's weird. He also stated that overturning abortion should be left up to the states (I believe). He recently said in an interview, that the way to deal with Iran is to offer them friendship and later stated that it was understandable that they might want a nuclear weapon, after all, many of the neighbors have them. He has stated that we were attacked on 9/11 because of our interventionist policies...in other words, it was our fault that crazy people wanted to kill 3,000 americans. I think I heard Reverend Wright saying pretty much the same thing during the last election. I could go on but I won't. I can only say that while I do agree with some of his positions, I disagree more than I agree...and I think he's weird.

For my part, I would tend to agree with the notion that abortion policy should be left to the states.  If the Supreme Court had taken that sensible position forty years ago, there would have been a lot fewer abortions and a lot less discord around the issue.   On Iran, I'd disagree -- I don't think you can have another terrorist sponsor state with nuclear weapons, particularly one that is peculiarly irrational.   But I don't think the position is "weird."  I think it's a viable position -- it's just one that seems to gibe with what the liberal Democrats have been saying for years, including Obama.  

The 9/11 stuff is another story.    I don't think the 15 (out of 18) middle-class Saudis who were part of the 9/11 plot attacked us because of our interventionist foreign policy; I think they did it because they were steeped in the ideology of radical Islam, which is bitterly anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Christian as an article of faith.   Blaming Americans for the pathology of the 9/11 murderers is simply wrong.   So, yes, I might be tempted to call Ron Paul's position on 9/11 "weird," if what this fellow says is accurate.   And I believe it is, based on what I've read, including about Paul's association with 9/11 Truther Alex Jones.   Or, perhaps not "weird," because his position is actually pretty widely held  -- it's just that it's pretty widely held on the hard left.   So maybe I'd call it "extreme."  In any event, it's not a position that can or should be accepted in the Republican Party.   (Ditto his apparent position on support for Israel.)

What is "weird" (and this one I'll stand by) is Paul's apparent sanctioning of newsletters that went out over his byline in the 1980s and 1990s, from which he profited, and which were often characterized by some pretty wild statements that could be characterized as racist and/or anti-semitic.   The Weekly Standard article last week did the digging, and the rest of the media is now picking up on it (see today's story in the New York Times).   He says he didn't write them, but that won't cut it... a viable national political candidate in America cannot under any circumstances be associated with this type of rhetoric, and not knowing what people were doing in your name smacks of pretty poor management skills.   One of Republicans unplayed cards last time around, which I hope will get more play this time, is just how "weird" and "extreme" some of Obama's associations were, with Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and others.   But Republicans can't attack Obama's associations with hard-core leftists on the one hand and defend a Republican candidate's associations with John Birchers on the other.   So I think Ron Paul is disqualified because of this.

And that's something of a pity, because on many issues, Paul is exactly right and within mainstream conservatism.   Consider his platform on energy:

As President, Ron Paul will lead the fight to:
* Remove restrictions on drilling, so companies can tap into the vast amount of oil we have here at home.
* Repeal the federal tax on gasoline. Eliminating the federal gas tax would result in an 18 cents savings per gallon for American consumers.
* Lift government roadblocks to the use of coal and nuclear power.
* Eliminate the ineffective EPA. Polluters should answer directly to property owners in court for the damages they create – not to Washington.
* Make tax credits available for the purchase and production of alternative fuel technologies.
It’s time for a President that recognizes the free market’s power and innovative spirit by unleashing its full potential to produce affordable, environmentally sound, and reliable energy.

Pretty good stuff, especially on drilling, eliminating red-tape standing in the way of new coal and nuclear plants, and getting the EPA off America's back.   (I'm not so hot on tax credits for certain preferred products over others... that doesn't seem too libertarian to me.)   I'd hope any Republican candidate would adopt this pro-growth energy agenda.

I haven't yet commented on the centerpiece of Paul's economic program, which is an antipathy for the Federal Reserve system and a desire to see America return to sound money or the gold standard.   I want to think about it some more.   My gut reaction is that politics is the art of the possible, and it's not rational to believe that we could eliminate the Fed or return to the gold standard politically, and it's not likely that we could do so, even if we wanted to, without massive economic dislocations and pain.   But, like I say, I'd like to think about it some more, and read some more about it.  

Girl of the Day - Alyssa Milano

Alyssa Milano was on "Who's The Boss?" as Tony Danza's daughter in the 1980s.   She later grew up to be mostly famous for having, well, how to say this without seeming like a dirty old man.... a nice body.   It's almost tragic to have to report that today she turned 39 years old.    Ah, well.   Tempus fugit, once again.

Two Endings

The season finales of Dexter and Homeland were both last night, and I had somewhat different reactions to them.   We've loved Dexter for years, but I tend to think that this year's story line marked the point where the show jumped the shark.   Too  many logical gaps, too many deus ex machinas, too much voice-over narration.   It's become basically a standard one-hour TV drama, not much better than Burn Notice (also set in Miami).   You know a show has lost it when you can call the ending fifteen minutes before it happened, which is what I did last night.

By contrast, Homeland is riveting, easily the best thing on TV right now, and while Claire Danes dominates the series with her portrait of Carrie Mathison, the bipolar CIA analyst, Damien Lewis as the returning Iraq war hero/Muslim convert-terrorist, is rapidly getting his game up to her level; and Mandy Patinkin as Carrie's mentor, Saul Berenson, is fantastic.   Last night's hour-and-a-half finale was fantastic, with twists I didn't see coming, including a great cliff-hanger moment at the end.   It'll be a long wait until next fall for Season Two.

Meanwhile, looking forward to Downton Abbey and Justified starting up in January.   (Does the Regular Guy watch too much TV, or what?)

At some point I will write a post on how the long-form dramatic TV series has essentially become the novel of the 21st century.   Have there been better novels over the past ten years than Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, Deadwood, etc.?   I haven't read them. 

MIT Hints at the Future

I have noted previously on this blog that MIT and other universities are increasingly putting courses online for free, and that there is less and less reason to pay $50,000 plus per year for an elite education, when the knowledge you would be buying is increasingly available at no cost:

In law and economics, one of the concepts underlying monopoly power (such that antitrust laws might apply) is the concept of "barriers to entry."   If a particular industry, say, auto manufacturing, has a high barrier of entry (it costs billions to set up plants and distribution networks, it costs billions to research and develop a car, etc.), then the companies in that industry can more easily develop monopoly power.   For years colleges and universities have had monopoly power because they were the only places you could go to get educated (or so they told us), and because the barriers to entry for accessing books and professors and course materials were so high.  You had to go there to get it -- where the professors were, where the libraries were, etc.    Now... not so much.   It's only a matter of time, and quickly accelerating at that, before American parents start thinking to themselves that they can lay out a course of study for their children for practically nothing that will give them the same education they could get for $150,000 or $200,000.   Homeschooling for college... a movement I am predicting will begin to take hold, and very soon.  

Now MIT is offering to provide certificates to students who complete their free online courses.   Would an employer take a stack of certificates from an otherwise uncredentialed young man or woman who claims to be able to have completed college-level work in serious technical subjects?   Maybe not now.   But soon they will.   In fact, I suspect that an employer might look pretty favorably on a 22 year-old who managed to get an elite education for free without getting into a pile of debt -- it might show the employer a lot of the kind of self-starting skills that translate into success.  

Science and Not Science

Science -- real science -- observes phenomena, creates mathematical models to represent those phenomena and predict new phenomena, and then makes more observations to determine if the predictions of its models were correct.   If they were, then the model, the theory, is confirmed.   If the predictions don't occur, then the model is "falsified," and the theory has to be discarded.   Note the mandatory nature of the last step -- if the observed reality does not match the predictions, the theory must be discarded.   Otherwise, what you're dealing with is not "falsifiable" and not science.   If you go forward without discarding the failed theory, you do so on faith; you're engaged in religion, not science.

The problem with global warming is increasingly in the last phases -- when the global warming proponents are confronted with the fact that global temperatures have not increased in the last 10-15 years the way their models predicted, they refuse to admit that their models are flawed and their theory has been "falsified."   But the evidence is getting to be overwhelming in the opposite direction:

While Earth’s climate has warmed in the last 33 years, the climb has been irregular. There was little or no warming for the first 19 years of satellite data.  Clear net warming did not occur until the El Niño Pacific Ocean “warming event of the century” in late 1997.  Since that upward jump, there has been little or no additional warming.

"Part of the upward trend is due to low temperatures early in the satellite record caused by a pair of major volcanic eruptions,” Christy said. “Because those eruptions pull temperatures down in the first part of the record, they tilt the trend upward later in the record.”

Christy and other UAHuntsville scientists have calculated the cooling effect caused by the eruptions of Mexico’s El Chichon volcano in 1982 and the Mt. Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines in 1991. When that cooling is subtracted, the long-term warming effect is reduced to 0.09 C (0.16° F) per decade, well below computer model estimates of how much global warming should have occurred.

The Coldest Winter in a Century - The Battle of the Bulge Begins, December 16, 1944

Sixty-seven years ago today, on December 16, 1944, during what was the coldest winter of the 20th century, the Germany Army attacked through the Ardennes against an American Army that had, to some extent (but not enough), run out of steam after a lightning surge across France and Belgium after the Normandy landings in June 1944, and during the horrific battle of the Hurtgen Forest in October and November.   The salient that the Germany Army pushed into the American lines became known as the Battle of the Bulge, and the heroics of American troops (notably the 101st Airborne at Bastogne) became the stuff of legends.   One of the stories that deserves to have a movie made of it is the story of
Lyle Bouck (the father of a boyhood baseball teammate of mine), a 20 year-old lieutenant from St. Louis, whose platoon held off an entire German battalion of more than 500 men for nearly an entire day, delaying the German advance in a vital sector of the northern front.   It's been memorialized in a good book, The Longest Winter.   Author Alex Kershaw said, "Had they not stood and held the Germans and halted their attack, or rather postponed it for a crucial 24 hours, the Battle of the Bulge would have been a great German victory."

Girl of the Day - Maggie Siff

I've started watching the FX show Sons of Anarchy at the suggestion of the Regular Neighbor, with whom I've watched over the years Dexter, Deadwood, Treme, Justified, Homeland, Rubicon, Breaking Bad and others.   (OK, I admit, we're TV junkies.... at least I don't watch The Mentalist!)

Anyway, Sons of Anarchy is very good, and the central character of Jax Teller, played by the British actor Charlie Hunnam, is fascinating as a good bad man who leads a violent Northern Californian criminal motorcycle gang called SAMCRO (Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Original chapter).  His love interest is the local girl made good, Dr. Tara Knowles, played by Maggie Siff, who was also on Mad Men for a year as the character Rachel Menken, a client of the ad agency and a lover of Don Draper.    Here's Siff in character on Sons:

And here she is on Mad Men:

Birthday Today - Ode to Joy Edition

It's Beethoven's 341st birthday today.   Given the season, it seems like a good time to revisit some of the most beautiful music ever made:

The God Particle

Michael Gerson of The Washington Post has a lovely article posted about the efforts of physicists at CERN in Switzerland to discover the Higgs boson -- the so-called "God particle" -- which the standard theory of atomic physics suggests is the source of all gravity in the universe through the creation of the Higgs field: 

Not only does the universe unexpectedly correspond to mathematical theories, it is self-organizing — from biology to astrophysics — in unlikely ways. The physical constants of the universe seem finely tuned for the emergence of complexity and life. Slightly modify the strength of gravity, or the chemistry of carbon, or the ratio of the mass of protons and electrons, and biological systems become impossible. The universe-ending Big Crunch comes too soon, or carbon isn’t produced, or suns explode.

The wild improbability of a universe that allows us to be aware of it seems to demand some explanation....  One reasonable alternative... is theism. It explains a universe finely tuned for life and accessible to human reason. It accounts for the cosmic coincidences. And a theistic universe, unlike the alternatives, also makes sense of free will and moral responsibility.

This is not proof for the existence of God. But the conflict here is not between faith and science; it is between the competing faiths of theism and materialism, neither of which can claim to be proved by science. Modern physics has accelerated smack into the limits of the scientific method. It raises questions it cannot answer but that human beings cannot avoid — matters of meaning and purpose. This is not a failure of science, just a recognition that measurement is not the only source of meaning.

This is the sort of stuff that makes me wish I'd been a scientist rather than a lawyer.

Girl of the Day - Making Up for Lost Time

Sorry for the lack of blogging this week -- duty called, and the Regular Guy was out of town for work.   To make it up to you -- oh, hell, just for the fun of it -- here's a wintry shot of you know who:

Girls of the Day - Teri Garr, Rita Moreno

Two birthday girls today, Teri Garr, who turns 65, and Rita Moreno, who turns 80.   Both were supporting actresses who stole the shows in all-time great movies:  Garr as the buxom lab in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, maybe the greatest American comedy ever; and Moreno as Anita, the saucy friend of Maria, in West Side Story, maybe the greatest American musical.   Here is Moreno's show-stopping moment, singing "America":



And here is Garr in a hilarious scene with Gene Wilder, in which they discover the "secret passageway":

Life After Pujols

In the aftermath of Albert Pujols' signing with the Angels, Cardinals fans seem alternatively angry (if they're stupid and take baseball way too seriously) or relieved (if they're smart and take baseball way too seriously).   I fall into the relieved category -- I think the contract the Angels signed is going to be a rock dragging them down for ten years.   There is literally no plausible baseball scenario where the WAR (wins against replacement) Pujols generates over the next 10 years will be worth $254 million.   (He would have to generate something on the order of 6-7 WAR a year, which means he would have to maintain an all-time superstar performance during his decline phase... not going to happen.)

But what do the Cardinals do over the next few years to replace the 4-6 WAR he's likely to give the Angels, and would have been likely to give the Cardinals (albeit while being overpaid)?   Lots of people are saying we should rush out and sign Jimmy Rollins at shortstop.   No.   At 33, he's more over the hill than Pujols, at a position where losing a step means everything.   He won't hit for power anymore, and his fielding will decline.   Others are saying we should trade for Hanley Ramirez to play shortstop.   Better, but Ramirez has a reputation as a head case.   Maybe that's undeserved, and maybe he'd change if he were in a place like St. Louis.    Still others are saying we should resign Rafael Furcal, who helped solidify our middle infield last year when he came over in a deadline deal in late July.   But Furcal is 34 too, and I wouldn't want him for more than one year.  

Here's what I would do:   nothing.   Tyler Greene can be the shortstop:  he'll steal bases and hit for some power.   Alan Craig will replace most of Pujols' WAR by taking over in right field.   And Daniel Descalso can take over second base for a couple of years until minor league phenom Kolten Wong is ready.   In addition to Wong the Cardinals have minor leaguers Zack Cox, Matt Carpenter, Matt Adams, Oscar Taveras, and Ryan Jackson who look to be major league ready in a year or two.   Plug them in around a nucleus of Holliday, Freese, Craig and Molina, and you'll compete every year.   Meanwhile, spend money to lock up Wainwright after this year, and within a couple of years you'll have a rotation of home-grown studs like Shelby Miller, Carlos Martinez and Tyrell Jenkins.    Meanwhile, for next year, you're defending world champs and, even without Pujols, you'll be better next year, because you'll have full years (hopefully) of Freese, Craig, Wainwright, and the rebuilt bullpen of Motte, Lynn, Salas, Sanchez, etc.  

Everyone wants the Cardinals to run out and spend $25 million on free agents... but there aren't any who are worth it.   Better to wait and have flexibility to add people at mid-season if we're in the hunt (which we will be).   At most, I'd add a righthanded outfielder at $6-8 million for a year.   Can you say "Carlos Beltran"?  

This is probably the most excited I've been waiting for spring training in years.   After Pujols is looking like a very interesting era in Cardinals history.

Girl of the Day - Teri Hatcher

I never watched Superman and I've never watched a minute of Desperate Housewives, so Teri Hatcher has never been on my radar screen.   But it's her birthday today, and I seem to recall that she was something of an Internet sensation back in the 1990s (back when we were dialing up and waiting for pages to load).   Apparently this was the most downloaded image back then:

Goodbye, Albert

It's a sad day in St. Louis for Cardinals fans, as Albert Pujols has apparently agreed to a 10 year/$250 million guaranteed contract with the Los Angeles Angels.   The Cardinals supposedly didn't offer more than 9 years and $200 million guaranteed, so they in essence called his bluff, and he called theirs.   I've written before that this was the smart move for the Cardinals:  here, here and here.    You just can't pay a player $25 million a year during his decline phase, which Pujols most assuredly is in.   Here, for instance, are his OPS figures (on base plus slugging) for the past four years:

Year              OPS
2008               1.114
2009               1.101
2010               1.011
2011                 .907

And here are his WAR (wins-against-replacement) for the same years:

Year              WAR
2008                  9.1      
2009                  9.0
2010                  7.5
2011                  5.1

So the Cardinals would have overpaid for him to stay, even if he'd taken their offer.   The Angels are most assuredly overpaying (at least in terms of wins; how the greatest Hispanic player ever helps them with TV audiences in SoCal is another story). 

But it's still sad.

Stan Wants Albert Back!

This picture is for real.   That's Brian Schwarze, Stan Musial's grandson, with the Man himself:

Chocolate Rain!

The Regular Son thinks this is just hilarious:

Girl of the Day - Jennifer Carpenter

Dexter has been a little bit disappointing this season.   How exactly does Dexter walk around doing what he does and never get seen?  And why don't people ever notice that he's never at work and never at home?   And why doesn't his picture get identified by witnesses as a man who's been prowling about in a murder shirt and latex gloves?   As the poets say, poetry requires the "willing suspension of disbelief," but Dexter this year has required a little bit too much of that.

It's been a great year, though, for the character of Dexter's sister, Debra Morgan, as she becomes the lieutenant in charge of Miami Metro Homicide, deals with her emotions after a shooting incident, deals with the breakup of her relationship with Quinn, etc.   Jennifer Carpenter has been great in the role this year, and is maybe the best reason to still watch the show.   (Otherwise, sad to say, it's jumping the shark for me.)

It's also her birthday.  

December 7, 1941

Pearl Harbor was the second and fatal bad decision made by the Axis powers in 1941.   The first was Adolph Hitler's decision, driven by his Nazi ideology, to invade Russia in June 1941 in Operation Barbarossa.   By December his troops were bogged down in the Russian winter, and the war of attrition on the Eastern Front had begun, a war Germany could not win -- there would always be more Russian men and women Stalin could mercilessly feed into the meat grinder, which Germany, with a much smaller population, could not match.  Then the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor brought America's industrial might and manpower fully into the war.   After that, victory was inevitable.

But I'm certain that it did not seem so at the time.   History always looks "inevitable" in retrospect.   When you're living it, with the fear of losing very real, and with the individual fear of losing your life, losing everything, a daily experience, victory must have seemed very far away indeed.   America wasn't ready in 1941, but it got ready quickly.   Could we do that again with our current government, our current national character?   I hope so, but I doubt it.

It's the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor today.   That means that a young man who rushed out the day after to enlist -- and there were hundreds of thousands --would, if alive, be around 90 years old now.  Anyone who has any chance to say thanks to a WWII veteran today ought to do so.   We won't have that many more chances.  

Girl of the Day - MM By Proxy (Michelle Williams)

Michelle Williams is the star of the new Marilyn Monroe biopic, My Week With Marilyn, which looks like something the Regular Wife and I will be seeing.   She's not Monroe, of course -- who is? -- but she's awfully attractive and supposedly very good in the role.   Here's the trailer: 

More on Ron Paul

I haven't gotten my arms fully around Ron Paul's economic program, but I have to tell you, having been shamed into looking at his website, I like most of what I see in his "Plan to Restore America."   Among the things I like are the following:

•  Cuts $1 trillion in spending during the first year of Ron Paul’s presidency, eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education.
•  Makes a 10% reduction in the federal workforce.
• Lowers the corporate tax rate to 15%.
• Repeals ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley.

All of these commitments are good, solid, conservative, free market/libertarian ideas.  Most of all, they are common-sensical.   Do we really think that we can't possibly return the federal budget to 2006 levels?   Were we really so compassionless with our federal spending in 2006?   Do we really think that we can't make a 10% reduction in the federal workforce?   Are there really not 10% of the people in any bureaucracy whose jobs aren't really needed?   For that matter, why don't we cut the salary of everyone who remains by another 10%?   Do we really think that federal workers won't work for 10% less than they're making now?   That we won't be able to find people to do those jobs?   Come on.   On the corporate tax, do we really think that American corporations ought to be taxed at a higher rate than French corporations?   Put it that way, and I don't see Americans not buying in.

Still in the process of re-examining my unexamined comment about Ron Paul's weirdness.   But I wanted to keep my French reader (readers?) updated. 

Dirty Little Secrets

This story about pedophilia in Hollywood is horrifying.   It's not surprising though from a community that still lionizes Roman Polanski, the child rapist.   But it got me to thinking.   We've now had three high profile stories in the past few weeks about pedophilia -- one in college football (Penn State), one in college basketball (Syracuse), and now one in Hollywood.   But no one to my knowledge has drawn the conclusion that all college football coaches are pedophiles, or all college basketball coaches are pedophiles, or all Hollywood casting directors or producers are pedophiles.   Why is it then that for twenty years we've had the mantra that all Catholic priests are pedophiles?  

The reality, of course, is that pedophiles are sick individuals, with the dual emphasis on "sick" and "individual."   There is no connection to any one walk of life, other than, perhaps, jobs where there is access to other people's children.   (The examples of child sexual abuse among teachers are legion, and yet, again, no one suggests that all teachers are pedophiles.)   It is only when the observer has a preexisting bias or bigotry against a particular group, and only when the larger society condones that bigotry, that the connection between the sick individual and the group is made.   Hence the slander against Catholic priests, the overwhelmingly vast majority of whom are wonderful, decent, holy men doing God's work.

Ron Santo, Hall-of-Famer

As a Cardinals fan, I grew up hating the Chicago Cubs.   In the 1960s, the Cubs were always one of the hardest teams for the Cardinals to play, with Ferguson Jenkins, Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Don Kessinger, Glenn Beckert and, of course, their great third baseman, Ron Santo.   Santo was the premier power-hitting third-baseman in the National League in the pitching-dominant 1960s, so his career numbers don't seem that fantastic, but they were:   342 HRs, 1331 RBIs, .277 BA, .826 OPS.   Those are significantly better than the numbers for Brooks Robinson, the greatest third baseman of that era (although Robinson was a much better fielder).   Santo's lifetime WAR (which are adjusted for era), were 66.4, more than the following men who got in the Hall before him:  Willie McCovey, Ernie Banks, Al Simmons, Ozzie Smith, Robbie Alomar, Ryne Sandberg, Jackie Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, Dave Winfield, Yogi Berra, Gary Carter, Willie Stargell, Billy Williams, Andrew Dawson, Hank Greenberg, Joe Medwick, Bill Terry, Bill Dickey, Enos Slaughter, Michey Cochrane, George Sisler, Tony Perez.   Wow.  He should have been in the Hall of Fame a long time ago (and certainly before he died last year from complications from diabetes, which he had throughout his life and played through as a major leaguer).   But it's great that he's finally in there.   

The November Unemployment Rate Drop Is Meaningless

Much may be made of the drop in the unemployment rate from 9.0% to 8.6% announced yesterday.   This Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel headline provides the standard left-liberal line that this is a "glimmer of hope":

It's not.   The economy only created 120,000 new jobs, with many of those seasonal, Christmas-shopping-related retail jobs.   Manufacturing jobs were flat.  

So why did the rate drop?   Most of it, if you dig into the statistics, came from 300,000 Americans leaving the work force.   They didn't find work; they actually lost hope of finding a new job.   It's actually not a "glimmer of hope," it's a fall into despair.   Only in America could 300,000 people losing interest in even looking for a job be viewed as a "glimmer of hope."    That's like every worker in Omaha, Nebraska, deciding all at once, to hell with it, this economy's going nowhere.

Here's the real story in a simple chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Since Obama took office, the labor force participation rate has dropped from 65.7% to 64.0%.   The difference of 1.7% of the civilian adult non-institutionalized population of approximately 240 million Americans is about 4.4 million Americans.   In other words, to get back to the percentage of people working that America had the day Obama was inaugurated, we'd have to add 4.4 million jobs, not 120,000!

A Regular Reader Responds on.... Ron Paul's "Weirdness"

One of my most loyal friends and readers -- OK, undoubtedly the most loyal Regular Guy reader who doesn't have the same last name as I do -- wrote in a comment about my offhand statement that Ron Paul isn't a serious GOP Presidential candidate because "weirdness is a disqualifier," asking how exactly is Ron Paul weird?   That's fair comment.   Many of us fall back on standard-issue attitudes as a substitute for reasons for our opinions.   My statement would have been accurate if I had said something like -- "I don't think Ron Paul is a viable candidate, even though I haven't studied his positions on any issues, because the general and probably also unstudied attitude toward him is that he's weird, and it's my sense that Republicans won't nominate someone once he's been labeled (however unfairly) as weird."   That would have shed my unearned mantle of pretending to know what I was talking about, and also would have been a more Christian attitude toward Paul himself.   After all, if you forget about the fact that he's running for President, why would I ever want to call anyone whom I don't know "weird"?   Not very nice, as my wife would be quick to tell me.

So, let's give Ron Paul an actual look.   First, let's think about character:  it's hard to quibble with Paul's character.  (Unlike, say, Gingrich (two divorces), or Cain (enough said, he's done)).   Paul, before his political career, was a doctor, a graduate of Duke University Medical School, a flight surgeon in the Air Force and Air National Guard, and an obstetrician and gynecologist who delivered 4,000 babies.  As a physician, Paul routinely lowered fees or worked for free and refused to accept Medicaid or Medicare payments.   He's been married to his wife Carol for 54 years, and has five children.   So far so good.    He passes the character test with flying colors.   (So do Romney, Santorum, Perry and Bachmann, at least as far as I can tell; I don't know enough about Huntsman or Johnson.)

Now, let's look at his positions and see if I can tell what if anything I would disagree with.   (I think that was my friend's real point... that I would probably like what I see if I actually bothered to look.)   Looking at the Ron Paul 2012 web-site, the first in the list of issues is abortion, and Paul says what I would want any GOP Presidential candidate to say:

As a physician, Ron Paul consistently put his beliefs into practice and saved lives by helping women seek options other than abortion, including adoption.  And as President, Ron Paul will continue to fight for the same pro-life solutions he has upheld in Congress, including:
* Immediately saving lives by effectively repealing Roe v. Wade and preventing activist judges from interfering with state decisions on life by removing abortion from federal court jurisdiction through legislation modeled after his “We the People Act.”
* Defining life as beginning at conception by passing a “Sanctity of Life Act.”

Couldn't be any better if I wrote it myself.    Check.   The next issue is health care.   Here's what Paul has to say:

The answer to our nation’s health care crisis lies in freedom – not force.
As President, Ron Paul will fight to put you back in control of your health care decisions, save you money on medical expenses, and institute reforms that will once again make America’s health care system the standard for other nations to follow.
He will work with Congress to:
* Repeal ObamaCare and end its unconstitutional mandate that all Americans must carry only government-approved health insurance or answer to the IRS.

Stop.   That's good enough for me.   Paul has some other interesting ideas on health care too, like giving tax credits to patients who purchase "negative outcomes" insurance as a way of limiting the cost of medical malpractice litigation; and prohibiting the federal government from creating a national database of personal health information.   But repealing Obamacare is the sine qua non for a GOP candidate, and he's on board.  

Jumping to national defense, here's what Paul's website has to say:

As Commander-in-Chief, Dr. Paul will lead the fight to:
* Make securing our borders the top national security priority.
* Avoid long and expensive land wars that bankrupt our country by using constitutional means to capture or kill terrorist leaders who helped attack the U.S. and continue to plot further attacks.
* End the nation-building that is draining troop morale, increasing our debt, and sacrificing lives with no end in sight.
* Follow the Constitution by asking Congress to declare war before one is waged.
* Only send our military into conflict with a clear mission and all the tools they need to complete the job – and then bring them home.
* Stop taking money from the middle class and the poor to give to rich dictators through foreign aid.

Some of this sounds reasonable, but it also sounds a bit isolationist.   One of the problems with campaign website I've noted is that they often speak in generalities.   You have to go elsewhere to put meat on the bones.   Would Paul retreat from Iraq, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory like Obama?  If so, I'd have to disagree; we need bases and the ability to project force in Iraq to provide a counterweight to Iran.   From Afghanistan?  I could perhaps agree here; Afghanistan is a different animal, and I don't see a civil society growing there; I also think that our being there unnecessarily exacerbates tensions with Pakistan.  Would he continue to aid Israel, our best and only ally in the Middle East?   Doesn't sound like it.   Would he support an Israeli air strike against Iran to keep it from going nuclear?   No.   So I might have problems with the Ron Paul foreign policy.   But I don't think isolationism -- which has a long history in the Republican Party -- qualifies him as weird.   It's a serious position that I might disagree with, but it's not weird.  

I'll look at the Ron Paul economic program in a separate post.   But for now I'd say he's a Republican who wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, repeal Obamacare, and make controlling our borders the top national security priority.   That's not bad, and it's certainly not "weird."  

I would have some knee-jerk issue with his age -- he's 76 and would be 77 when he takes office.  He'd need a young VP candidate.   Paul-Rubio, anyone?

Message from the Regular Daughter #2

I doubt this blog is very good, but I'm writing on it anyway.   Did you know the Regular Guy has readers in Singapore?   This message goes out to all my daddy's readers in Asia.

Thoughts on Not-Romney

UPDATE:  Charles Krauthammer calls it as a Romney v. Gingrich race for the nomination.   As I say below, I'm not so sure that Perry won't get a new look.   But here's how Krauthammer frames it:

My own view is that Republicans would have been better served by the candidacies of Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan or Chris Christie. Unfortunately, none is running. You play the hand you’re dealt. This is a weak Republican field with two significantly flawed front-runners contesting an immensely important election. If Obama wins, he will take the country to a place from which it will not be able to return (which is precisely his own objective for a second term).

Every conservative has thus to ask himself two questions: Who is more likely to prevent that second term? And who, if elected, is less likely to unpleasantly surprise?

I guess it's fair to say that Krauthammer is not so subtly saying:  it's Romney.

***
The GOP Presidential race is essentially boiling down to be Romney versus Not-Romney.   The race to be the Not-Romney candidate is where the action is, obviously.   But most of the Not-Romney pretenders are done, finished, stick a fork in them.  


Huntsman - for a Not-Romney, he's too much like Romney.   In fact, he's a Super-Romney.   If we nominate him, why not just vote for the Democrat.  Not going to fly.

Santorum - for whatever reason, has never caught on.   Personality?   Appearance?   Whatever.   I think he's a strong conservative, he has good experience, and he's a good man and strongly pro-Life.   But if he hasn't flown by now, he's not going to.

Johnson - Who?

Paul - in a word, no.  Weirdness is a disqualifier.

Bachmann - improving, but she exposed her own weirdness in the summer with the Gardasil/vaccination stuff.   That's a fringe issue, right up there with the 1950s fluoridation scare.   And she's a woman.   Like it or not, we're not electing a woman anytime soon unless her name is Margaret Thatcher.

Cain - he'll have plenty of time to fool around after today, when his wife tells him to abandon his campaign or face a big divorce suit.   Speaking of suits, his was empty from the get-go, and his candidacy was a matter of conservative voters projecting their fondest hopes on him.   He's not Thomas Sowell, in other words, not even close.

So where does that leave us?   Gingrich or Perry.   The Great Debater versus The Worst Debater.   Gingrich with a lot of baggage; Perry with real executive experience and a great story to tell from Texas.   Gingrich with big but sometimes too-big ideas, ideas for the sake of ideas; Perry with conservative bona fides.   Will Perry get another look after his implosions in the debates?   Or will we select our candidate the way a high school debate club selects its President, based on arguably a superficial criterion -- who can most fluently deliver canned responses?

Or will we end up back where we started with a hold-your-nose Romney candidacy?

Girl of the Day - Well, Hell, Maybe the Girl of the Millenium

New pictures of Marilyn Monroe from 1952 are being auctioned off.   I suspect they'll bring a pretty penny.

Elvis Touts Satchmo

Elvis Costello is one of our favorites and this week he did something both very odd and very cool.  He has a new boxed set coming out for Christmas, but apparently his record label didn't price it the way he wanted them to -- the price they set was $225, which he thought was too high.   So he went on his website and told the world not to buy his record, but instead to buy a boxed set of Louis Armstrong recordings:

We at www.elviscostello.com find ourselves unable to recommend “The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook” as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire.

All our attempts to have this number revised have been fruitless so we are taking the following unusual step.

If you want to buy something special for your loved one at this time of seasonal giving, we suggest, “Ambassador Of Jazz” - a cute little imitation suitcase containing ten re-mastered albums by one of the most beautiful and loving revolutionaries who ever lived – Louis Armstrong.

The box should be available for under one hundred and fifty American dollars and includes a number of other tricks and treats.

Frankly the music is vastly superior.

Pretty cool.   So we'll send out some props to Elvis C. by playing one of his all-time great songs:



But, of course, he is right.   Louis Armstrong is far superior:

Girls of the Day - Shameless Edition

As noted previously, the Regular Wife and I have started watching the show Shameless with William Macy and Emmy Rossum.   So far, mixed reviews -- it ain't Homeland, I can tell you that much.  

Anyway, two young women (both over 21) play high school students who befriend the brothers (one straight and one gay) of the Gallagher family.   They are played by Laura Slade Wiggins (the blonde) and Jane Colburn Levy (the brunette).   Both are pretty sleazy on the show, which is one of the reasons we give it mixed reviews so far -- no one on the show so far isn't sleazy.  

Here they are in civvies:

From John E. at Ace - Chart-Fu!

A great set of charts from John E. at Ace of Spades HQ about the Obama Administration's utter failures on the economy.   Have them handy when confronting liberal friends.   On the other hand, since when have liberals been interested in facts?

Meanwhile, Back to Our Show... As the World Burns

There was a story on the front-page of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about how people put pictures of their pets on their smart phones.   Big spread, full color picture.   I guess the editors know what America wants.  

Meanwhile, there's this story from the New York Times:

Islamists claimed a decisive victory on Wednesday as early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority in Egypt’s first Parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the most significant step yet in the religious movement’s rise since the start of the Arab Spring.

 

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

 

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

That victory came at the expense of the liberal parties and youth activists who set off the revolution, affirming their fears that they would be unable to compete with Islamists who emerged from the Mubarak years organized and with an established following.

Remember the "Arab Spring"?   It's turning into the Islamist Winter.   And our Commander in Chief is playing golf while automatic cuts in defense spending are looming because of the failure of the Super Committee.