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.