Sling Baby, Sling!

Hat tip to Powerline.   I don't know, maybe it's me, but this is hilarious:

On the Media's Treatment of the Marine Desecration Incident

There is a good deal of press hubbub about a video that came out this week showing American Marines urinating on the bodies of Taliban fighters.   My view is captured by this statement by Allen West, retired Army lieutenant colonel (pictured above) and current Republican Congressman from Florida:

“I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

“All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?

“The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

“As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.”

Perspective.   Context.    Proportionality.   Common Sense.  

Girl of the Day - Penelope Ann Miller

Penelope Anne Miller turns 47 today, which probably won't make the network news.   A minor movie star, she was the right age to be someone I took notice of in my mid-20s as being sexy-cute or cute-sexy, i.e., not flat-out beautiful, but nice-looking and looking like she was nice.   A girl you might take home to meet Mom, in other words.   Actresses are an interesting breed, because, with rare exceptions, they tend to peak in their 20s and 30s and then disappear when ingenue and romantic roles dry up.   I also think the answer to the question "whatever happened to her?" is often that she went off to have a family and lost career momentum.   Much the same thing happens in other careers, though it's probably made more difficult in acting because, unlike law or medicine or business, if you try to get back in at age 40 after you've had your kids, there aren't many roles.   That's not a "glass ceiling," it's just reality.   Ms. Miller, for instance, had two daughters when she was 36 and 45, so that's where she was in the 2000s.

Her best performance was probably in the 1993 Al Pacino movie, Carlito's Way:

$1.2 Trillion

President Obama has asked Congress for another debt ceiling increase, this time of $1.2 trillion.   If you read the article, it seems like everyone is treating this with a rather blasé attitude:

The request is largely a formality. It’s the third and final request the president is allowed under a deal the White House and lawmakers reached in August to prevent a government default.

 

But Republicans are likely to use the election-year request as an opportunity to criticize the president’s spending policies.

Congress has 15 days to reject the president’s request. The White House says Obama would veto any objections in order to avoid a default.

Obama originally planned to make this request in late December. But with Congress on vacation until mid-January, lawmakers asked Obama to delay his request so they could vote on the matter when they return.

I don't know.   Maybe it's just me, but I am not quite so calm about borrowing $1.2 trillion.   Hmmmm... there are approximately 150 million people in the workforce, working hard to support their families.    Of those, the top 10% pay roughly 70% of the federal income taxes.   So 15 million people are really carrying the load.    Let's say that $750 billion of the new borrowing is attributable to those 15 million people.   So Obama just blithely, in an article that doesn't even make the front page, asks the federal government, acting on behalf of the American people, to borrow roughly $50,000 per member of that top 10%.

I'm one of those guys.   He just spent about one-third of what's left on my mortgage, that I've been slaving to pay off in 15 years so I can maybe afford college for my kids.   And he'll do the same thing next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.  

Sheesh!   When will this crap stop?

Girl of the Day - Justified Version

One of our favorite shows, Justified, comes back for its third season next Tuesday.   The U.S. Marshal's ex-wife is played by Natalie Zea and his ex-flame is played by Joelle Carter, both of whom are relatively easy on the eyes:

Birthday Today - Edmund Burke

The father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, was born today in 1729.   Burke's greatest moment came in his reaction to the French Revolution, when he struck a cautionary note:  

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas,the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared,and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver, and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men, but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.

Maybe the most useful political advice ever given.   It's applicable in America, for instance, to the Occupy Wall Street mobs (and the other myriad offshoots of 1960s radicalism).   And it's certainly applicable overseas to the supposedly "democratic" crowds in , for instance, Egypt whose idea of democracy was to vote in the Muslim Brotherhood.   The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.  

I'm Just Sayin'...

An abandoned baby was apparently found in a tent in the Occupy DC encampment, according to this story.

Hard to imagine what the media might have done with a story like this if a baby had been abandoned at a Tea Party rally.   I'm just sayin'....

Good Point on Families and Santorum

Lisa Schiffren makes a key point on NRO:

Traditional, nuclear families, composed of legally married mothers and fathers raising their children, allocating tasks as they wish, while taking care of those children and earning a living, are the basic unit of a self-sufficient society. If there is an institution more embattled in America than the traditional family, I can’t name it. Santorum gets this, which is important, as the out-of-wedlock childbearing rate continues to hover at a civilization-ending, way-past-unsustainable 40 percent. Anyone who wants to cut the size and scope of the welfare state, or repeal Obamacare, really needs to comprehend what that figure means, going forward. Because very few of those single moms will ever be able to pay for health care or education for their children. This is true regardless of what one thinks of the status of gay relationships, abortion, Catholic doctrine, or the price of tea in China.

Obama's Strategery

Yuval Levin has some interesting observations at National Review Online about President Obama's apparent re-election strategy:

I know we’re all supposed to think that the primaries are poised to turn out a weak Republican nominee and that President Obama will swoop in this fall and carry the day with some brilliant pincer move that simultaneously dubs the Republican too extreme, too moderate, too boring, and too weird. And I suppose it’s possible that the president and his team will suddenly turn out to possess keen political skills they have been hiding somewhere for the past three years. But can we spend a moment pondering the approach that team Obama seems to be hatching so far?...  

Based on what the president and his advisers have said and done in recent weeks, that strategy appears to consist of creating populist confrontations with Congress and then complaining that Washington is broken because Republicans won’t let the president have his way. That’s a strategy that tells the public that the current situation in Washington is untenable and change is needed. Is that not an odd way for a Democratic incumbent president (whose party also controls the Senate) to run against a Republican outsider? It first of all exacerbates the public’s mistrust of government, which tends to reinforce Republican policy proposals (since those generally aim to take power away from government) but to undermine Democratic ones (which generally aim to give more power to government). It also implies that President Obama is having trouble doing his job, which can’t be a great re-election theme. It says that the problem we have is the result of a conflict between the president and Congress in a year when the Republican Party, but not the Democratic Party, will be led by someone who is neither the president nor in Congress and so is presumably not part of that problem. And it argues (understandably) that things could only get better if the White House and Congress were both held by Democrats—but the last time that happened was when we ended up with those unpopular achievements of Obama’s first two years. Is he proposing to do more of that?...

Maybe there’s another attempted image transformation in the works, though the past ones clearly haven’t worked very well. Maybe there’s another shoe to drop in the president’s confrontational populist agenda, which will turn it into a workable strategy. Or maybe the president and his team are just not very good at this. The evidence of the past three years would certainly seem to support the latter view.

When Republicans consider their current crop of candidates, we tend to worry that the Obama machine will make mincemeat out of them.   But, to me, I am reminded of Grant's commen to his generals during the Battle of the Wilderness.   Reacting to their trepidations about what Lee might be doing, he acerbically told them to forget about what Lee was going to do to them, and start thinking about what we're going to do to him.

Republicans have extraordinarily good arguments why Obama doesn't deserve a second term, whomever they end up nominating.

Laettner

Here's a great article about the recruitment of Christian Laettner to Duke in the late 1980s.   Laettner was at the center in the greatest moment in sports I've ever seen, his shot in OT to beat Kentucky in 1992:



The second greatest moment just happened this fall... you know what I'm talkin' 'bout:

Girl of the Day - Zoe Boyle

I saw a preview for the second season of Downton Abbey, and the new love interest for Matthew Crawley is played by Zoe Boyle.   I thought she looked familiar, and then I realized that she had also played the character of Trinity, the Irish half-sister of Jax Teller, in Sons of Anarchy.   A very beautiful young gal who, like all the British actresses I like, will probably disappear into the BBC never to be heard from again.

Prediction Update

I had done fairly well with my predictions in Iowa, but I was much further off in New Hampshire for last night's GOP primary:

                             Actual                                    Prediction

Romney                39%                                         33%
Paul                      23%                                         20%
Huntsman             17%                                         15%
Gingrich                 9%                                          11%
Santorum                9%                                         17%
Perry                       1%                                           2%

One possible reason:  the number of cross-over votes from non-Republicans was greater than I accounted for, due to the absence of a Democratic primary.   These cross-overs inflated the numbers for Romney, Paul and Huntsman, the candidates with more appeal to liberals (Huntsman), centrists (Romney) or libertarians (Paul), and diluted the numbers for conservatives.

Another possible reason:  maybe I'm just not that smart.   My prediction for Santorum was probably wishful thinking.   I should have realized that a hard-line pro-Life family values Catholic conservative wouldn't sell in the Northeast.

In any event, Romney seemed to surge back toward 40%, which I didn't expect (although everyone expected him to win handily given the demographics of NH and its closeness to Massachusetts.   And Paul continued to do better than expected (again likely due to crossover appeal to liberals (on his foreign policy) and libertarians (on his economics)).   Huntsman bet his campaign on NH and came in third, but I doubt whether he will have any appeal in South Carolina or Florida, so he's likely just hanging on.   And Santorum, the story coming out of Iowa, came back down to Earth in NH, although his showing was substantially higher than he would have commanded just a week or two ago.   Perry, meanwhile, is dead in the water.

As to Gingrich, the oddity of this campaign continues.   Gingrich did well when he was not taken seriously but was playing the role of senior statesman, dazzling in debates without deriding his opponents.   Once he got in the game, his inner nasty reared its ugly head, and his campaign started collapsing.   His attacks on Romney over the weekend, essentially for having been successful in business, were pathetic, and hurt him, while probably marginally helping Romney.   

In sum, I think it's over and we're looking at a Romney candidacy.   Of the rest of the candidates, only Santorum looks like a viable VP choice.  

But, of course, I've been wrong before.

New Hampshire Prediction

The latest polling from New Hampshire has the six main candidates as follows:

 

Newt Gingrich .................................. 9%

Jon Huntsman ................................... 16%

Ron Paul ....................................... 18%

Rick Perry ..................................... 1%

Mitt Romney .................................... 37%

Rick Santorum .................................. 11%

Undecided........................ 7%

Here's my prediction:

1. Romney.   He'll win easily by double-digits, but will have less than 35%, and the story will be about a bit of a fade.   Romney in 2008 got 31.6% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, losing to John McCain.   If he can't get more than that figure this year (after getting the same number of votes in Iowa in 2012 as he got in 2008), I'd expect to hear a meme that Romney's been campaigning for four years and hasn't closed the deal with any new voters in all that time.  I say Romney eeks out 33%.

2. Paul.   I think there are enough libertarians and cross-over independents and liberals who will get Paul to second-place.   It will be discounted by the media and the Republican establishment.    I have him at 20%.

3.  Santorum.   I think Santorum is on the upswing and will overtake Huntsman for third, which will be the big story going forward.   I predict 17%.

4.  Huntsman.   Fourth-place causes him to "reassess" his candidacy.   15%.

5.   Gingrich.   Fifth-place causes Gingrich to double-down on nasty-speak until someone in the party (oh, please, Wise Men, save us!) tells Gingrich to cool it for the sake of the country. 11%.

6.  Perry.   Hasn't competed well and didn't compete here at all.   South Carolina is his Waterloo.   2%... in the Buddy Roemer range.

Romney and Bain Capital

The Regular Guy was out of town on Sunday and Monday traveling for work, so I missed the brouhaha that apparently arose when some Republican Presidential candidates attacked the frontrunner, Mitt Romney, for having had the audacity to start and run a private equity fund that -- I'm shocked, shocked -- bought companies and then restructured them to make them more efficient, sometimes by laying people off.   Here's Newt Gingrich making the point:

Gingrich accused Romney of building the fortune that has underwritten his political career through a “flawed system” – better known as private equity – in which “a handful of rich people [can] manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money” by “looting a company and leaving behind broken families and broken neighborhoods."

And here's Rick Perry making somewhat the same point:

"Mitt Romney's going to have a hard time coming into South Carolina and making the people here think that he's anything other than just a rich Wall Streeter who took advantage of their businesses.

People lost their jobs, they lost their pensions, they lost a lot.

.... shutting down these businesses -- with the only real reason that most people can see -- was so that Bain Capital could profit and he could get richer.

This is a remarkably stupid point.   Gingrich and Perry sound like the Occupy Wall Street crowd, decrying evil capitalists.   Look, the point is simple.   Time has shown and economics has proven from Adam Smith through von Mises that the greatest good for the greatest number of people in society comes from individuals seeking to maximize their own interests, because in doing so they maximize the efficient allocation of resources to the production of goods and the providing of services that human beings actually want and need.   If a company is more valuable being broken up into parts and sold off, then that use of resources is more efficient, and the resulting capital can be allocated to more productive uses.   If a company is more valuable by downsizing its workforce through laying off inefficient or unproductive or redundant personnel, then the resulting human capital can be "allocated" to more productive uses too.   No one is served, not the corporation, not the individual worker, and not society as a whole, if there are unproductive and inefficient corporations.  

Besides this macroeconomic point, there is also a moral and legal point.   The owners of a corporation are its shareholders.   The duty of a manager of a corporation is to maximize value for the shareholders, period.   The notion that a corporation has a moral duty to employees or to "neighborhoods" or "communities" is socialism, pure and simple, and to the extent that its infected our discourse or law, we've been misled.   What Gingrich is saying, essentially, is that there ought to be some mechanism (law?  legislation?   federal bureaucrats?) whereby an investor such as Bain Capital would be forced to transfer wealth from its investors to its employees, no matter how unproductive they are.   That's bad economics, it's bad public policy, it's bad morally.   That supposed conservatives in a Republican primary are lurching into this argument simply to score points against the frontrunner is sad.

Notably, Rick Santorum hasn't fallen for this line of "reasoning":

Santorum also declined to take a shot at Romney over a remark earlier from the front-runner that he “likes to fire” workers who are not doing a good job.

“We try to hire good people, we try to keep them employed. If someone if obviously not performing their duty and their mission, obviously a business has a responsibility for the greater good of the business and the other employees to make sure that everybody there is pulling their weight,” Santorum said.

Asked whether Romney’s corporate takeover experience at Bain Capital would be a liability, Santorum said: “I’m not making it a liability. I believe in the private sector.”

***

P.S.  Santorum is both right on the merits here and also right politically.   As of today, with the likelihood of a New Hampshire double-digit win and a win (because of better organization) in South Carolina next week, Romney has the wind at his back.   Santorum may very well be playing for the VP spot.   He makes some sense for Romney.   First, he has much deeper experience on the national level than people like Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, or Susanna Martinez (governor of New Mexico).   Second, he would bring along the Christian right, who will like his strong family values, pro-Life positions.   Third, he helps Romney in Pennsylvania, the most likely big blue state that Republicans might be able to turn red in 2012.   I still think Rubio is the likeliest VP candidate, but Santorum has been vetted through these campaigns, he'd be a good debater (against Biden), and he's credible on foreign policy.

Girl of the Day - MM: Skinny Version

I happened onto an article on the web by a gay designer who did the design for the Christie's auction of Marilyn Monroe's clothes in 2000, and was surprised by this passage.   I think you will be too:

The process of cataloguing and displaying Marilyn’s bits took months. During this time I learned some crazily illuminating stuff about the breathy blond bombshell. Brace yourself for some next-level revelations.

Right away, I discovered that Marilyn was shockingly and unimaginably slender. She was sort of like Kate Moss but fleshier on top. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

When it came to finding mannequins to fit her dresses, I simply couldn’t. M.M.’s drag was too small for the average window dummy....

When you look at Marilyn on-screen and—armed with the information I have just provided—you realize that the busty, ample gal brimming over Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot is literally one-third your size, you have every right to become suicidal. If she looks like that—zaftig, almost chubby—what on earth would you look like under similar circumstances?

Conventional wisdom says that the camera adds five pounds. After my Marilyn experience, I would say it’s more like 500 pounds.

More on Santorum's Lost Child

As I suggested days ago, the conservative blogosphere is quickly going into high dudgeon over the unconscionable criticism by some liberal commentators of the decision by Rick Santorum and his wife to briefly bring their stillborn baby home to grieve with their other children.    Here's Patterico:

But the problem is not just that some leftists can’t understand the love that some people feel for their unborn children — or for their children who (like Sarah Palin’s son Trig) were born with disabilities. What really infuriates is the contempt they show for parents who make different choices than they would . . . and the smug arrogance with which they pronounce judgment on the most intimate aspects of others’ private lives.

What Robinson has done, and what Colmes did the other day, is indecent. These men would never say such a thing to Santorum’s face. (Or maybe they would — which is possibly even worse.) What sickness has invaded our body politic that people feel free, not only to act the cretin, but to do so on national television while sporting insufferable, supercilious, self-satisfied smirks like those we have seen on the mugs of Colmes and Robinson in recent days?

In short: how dare they? How dare they?!

And here's Peter Wehner, which I quote at length because he makes three great points:

On these comments I have three observations to make, the first of which is that spending time with a stillborn child (or one who died shortly after birth, as in the Santorum case) is commonly recommended. The matter of taking the child home for a few hours is less common, but they did it so that their other children could also spend a little time with the deceased child, and that is definitely recommended. For example, here’s the official page of the American Pregnancy Association (an association of health-care providers that treat pregnant women) about stillbirth. It recommends that parents spend time with the child, as the Santorums did, and the APA writes:

With the loss of your baby, your family members will also grieve. Your baby is someone’s granddaughter, brother, cousin, nephew or sister. It is important for your family members to spend time with the baby. This will help them come to terms with their loss. If you have other children, it is very important to be honest with them about what has happened by using simple and honest explanations. It is your decision whether you would like the children to see the baby. Ask for a Child Life Specialist at the hospital; these are trained professionals who can help you prepare your children for the heartbreaking news, and prepare them to see the baby if you wish.

This is basically what the Santorum family did. They also had a funeral, which is often done in these kinds of situations. It seems to be enormously helpful to people in a moment of terrible pain. So Robinson, like Colmes, was speaking out of a seemingly bottomless well of ignorance.

The second point is the casual cruelty of Robinson and those like him. Robinson seems completely comfortable lampooning a man and his wife who had experienced the worst possible nightmare for parents: the death of their child. It is one thing to say you would act differently if you were in the situation faced by Rick and Karen Santorum​; it’s quite another to deride them as “crazy” and “very weird,” which is what commentators on the left are increasingly doing, and with particular delight and glee.

We are seeing how ideology and partisan politics can so disfigure people’s minds and hearts that they become vicious in their assaults on those with whom they have political disagreements. I would hope no one I know would, in a thousand years, ridicule parents who were grappling with unfathomable human pain. Even if those parents were liberal. Even if they were running for president and first lady.

The third point is it tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the times.

Girl of the Day - The Downton Abbey Girls

The Regular Wife and I are starting our countdown to Downton Abbey by re-watching the first season.   It's as wonderful as I remembered -- especially the wounded soul, Mr. Bates, who comes to Downton to be the valet to the master of the house, the Earl of Grantham, Robert Crawley.   He might be my favorite character on TV right now.

Anyway, it seems an appropriate time to highlight the three sisters of the house -- no sons, the estate's entailed, much as in Pride and Prejudice... you get the picture.

First, there's the eldest, beautiful sister, Mary, played by Michelle Dockery:

Next, there's the somewhat plain sister, Edith, played by Laura Carmichael:

Finally, there's the somewhat wild, liberal suffragette youngest sister, played by Jessica Brown-Findlay:

We.   Can't.   Wait.

***

P.S.   Here they are in civvies:

Pujols' Deal with Angels.... Hmmmmmmmm.....

There must have been more to the Pujols-Cardinals divorce than just money... he must have really wanted out of St. Louis, no matter what sugar-coating he put on it.    Here's what the Angels' deal ended up being, according to ESPN:

A breakdown of Albert Pujols' 10-year guaranteed contract with the Angels, with additional provisions:

Salary
2012: $12 million
2013: $16 million
2014: $23 million
2015: $24 million
2016: $25 million
2017: $26 million
2018: $27 million
2019: $28 million
2020: $29 million
2021: $30 million

Personal services agreement
Sides agree that after the expiration of the contract or Pujols' retirement as a player, they will enter into a 10-year personal services relationship and Pujols will be paid $1 million annually.

Milestone accomplishments
The sides agree they will enter into a separate marketing agreement in which Pujols will be paid for the promotion and marketing of specified milestone accomplishments. Among them are a $3 million payment for 3,000 hits and a $7 million payment for 763 home runs.

Award Bonuses
Most Valuable Player: $500,000
MVP second or third place: $75,000
Gold Glove: $75,000
Silver Slugger: $75,000
All-Star election or selection: $50,000
World Series MVP: $100,000
ALCS MVP: $75,000

This just isn't as good as it was made out to be.   Pujols is guaranteed only $230 million in salary over ten years, but only $100 million of it is guaranteed in the first five years!   That means that the Cardinals' offer of $130 million over five years was actually significantly better than the Angels' deal, at least over those first five years.   To be sure, Pujols gets silly guaranteed money for his 37-41 year-old seasons ($130 million), but those are inflated somewhat due to the time value of money.   (For instance, the $26 million per year in 2012 the Cardinals were offering, at a rate of return of 8%, is the equivalent of $56 million in 2021; even at an inflation rate of 3%, it's still worth $35 million.)   The personal services agreement is meaningless... Pujols as a St. Louis icon would be worth much more than $1 million a year had he stayed.    And the incentive clauses are both typical (everyone gets an incentive for being an MVP) or unlikely (I don't think AP gets to Bonds' HR record).... realistically, I see him getting about $4 million in incentives ($3 million for 3000 hits plus some All-Star and Gold Glove money, plus maybe 1 MVP at most.)  

Finally, the highest marginal California state income tax rate is 9.3%, while the highest marginal Missouri state income tax rate is 6%.   Think that's not significant?   3.3% on Pujols' deal is getting up near $8-9 million over the life of his contract.   Couple that with a higher cost of living in SoCal, and the money is close to being a wash.

So, at the end of the day, I don't think Pujols much liked the St. Louis management team of DeWitt and Mozeliak, and he wanted to try something new.   Nothing wrong with that.   We'll see if we hear very many stories next year about how much the Cards miss Pujols' influence in the clubhouse.   It might not be very much.   (Sort of like how many Packers talk about how they miss Brett Favre... none.)

Girl of the Day - January Jones

I can't wait (but, actually, I guess I can, since we've been waiting a pretty long time) for the next season of Mad Men, which is now scheduled to premiere on March 16th (only ten more weeks!).   What will Don Draper's ex-wife, played by January Jones, be doing?   I hope a lot:

Santorum and Anti-Catholic Bigotry

I noted yesterday that the story of how Rick Santorum and his wife Karen mourned the loss of a stillborn child is a story that is utterly familiar to practicing Catholics -- tens of millions of Americans.   Some of the reaction of the mainstream media, including the clip below from Eugene Robinson, a columnist for the Washington Post, is unbelievably vulgar anti-Catholic bigotry, nothing else.   To call the father of seven children, a man known to be a believing Catholic, "weird" for treating his infant child like... well, like a person, is as vile as calling a practicing Jew "weird" for keeping kosher in his home.   (Say, like Joe Lieberman, for instance.... can you imagine what would happen if a right-leaning columnist said that about Lieberman?)  

It is a sad commentary on the state of our culture that a mainstream Catholic like Santorum -- or a mainstream Mormon like Mitt Romney -- will be viewed as "weird," while a man like Obama who for twenty years frequented a church led by a certified American-hating communist revolutionary, Jeremiah Wright, gets a free pass.   But, then, the difference is.... it's OK for Obama, because everyone knows he was a hypocrite who didn't really believe.

Here's the Eugene Robinson segment, which makes me want to puke:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Hubris and Punditry

The wonder of blogging on the Internet includes the ability to look back at one's own predictions.   It's not pretty, and it's no wonder that the paid pundits in the mainstream media almost never do so, because it would expose them as know-nothings, or at least as know-not-much-more-than-we-do.   Anyway, here's what I had to say five weeks ago about Rick Santorum:

... you can't beat somebody with nobody.   Obama loses to a generic Republican over and over.   But we can't run a generic Republican.   We have to run an actual person.   And he's got to come from among these three men:   Romney, Gingrich, Perry.    The remaining candidates -- Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, Paul, and Huntsman -- aren't serious, and should bow out.   Then the question will boil down to whether either Gingrich or Perry can convince people that they could be a viable candidate against Obama.   If not, then Romney will be the default candidate...

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.

Cain is already out, and Bachmann may follow today.   But Gingrich and Perry have disappointed, and meanwhile Rick Santorum has surged to the forefront as Romney's main challenger.   I still think Romney will end up the default candidate, but I was wrong about a lot of other things.  

Girl of the Day - Downton Abbey Alert! (Joanne Froggatt)

The great PBS miniseries Downton Abbey is scheduled to start its second season on Sunday, 1/8, and the Regular Wife and I can't wait.   Here's one of our favorite characters, the head maid-in-love-with-the-mysterious-butler, Anna Smith, played by Joanne Froggatt:

Needless to say, she looks slightly different in civvies:

Iowa Prediction

This is going out on a limb, but here are my predictions for the Iowa caucus:

1. Romney - by a nose.   Too much organizational strength, which matters in the caucuses.
2. Santorum - closing fast.   Great effort at "retail politics," and I also think he'll get a boost from evangelicals from the story that hit yesterday about his loss of a child in the 1990s, and the attack on his decision with his wife to bring the baby home for the funeral and to meet his other children.   Anti-Catholics may not understand this decision, but Catholics do, and I think Evangelicals will.  (See below.)
3. Paul - mildly fading.   The Paul supporters will come out, but I think he gets fewer Republicans and fewer Independents than he might have thought.
4. Perry - mildly climbing.   But it's not enough... there will be talk about him withdrawing after a disappointing showing.
5. Gingrich - fading fast.   And inevitably, in my judgment.   Too many people had the reaction: "We're not really going to nominate him, are we?"
6. Bachmann - also fading fast.   The hard-line conservatives are breaking from her and Perry to Santorum late.
7. Huntsman - not even trying.   Huntsman is hoping for a strong showing in New Hampshire.   This looks like the failed Giuliani strategy from 2008 redux.

So, at the end of the day, it looks like the conservative "not-Romney" vote may be coalescing around Santorum.   Which is probably just fine with Romney, since he's going to win NH big next week, and count on the inevitability talk (and the big money) to follow.

***

Here is Santorum responding to the attack on his decision about his baby by the liberal commentator Alan Colmes.   It's pretty gracious (and attractive) under the circumstances:

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.