A sterling idea

The  Republican lawmaker probably didn't mean to be  taken too seriously when he said the deadlocked Iowa legislature should throw up its hands, go home, and try again next year. I suspect he was just amusing himself  by jerking chains.

Our Capitol Theatre of the Absurd is skivvy-knotted over -- you guessed it -- how much to extort and spend. Most of the hot air is being belched over commercial property taxes which are too high. Republicans want to cut them. Democrats, secure in their knowledge that all business people are thieving plutocrats, don't.

If our solons go home without writing a budget, the state would, theoretically, have to shut down. And we learn the results from Senate Boss Michael Gronstal, who represents  AFSCME, SIEU, the teacher's union, and, incidentally at best, the people who elected him.

“Therefore, one-quarter of all people in nursing homes would be thrown out ... and schools would lose thousands of teachers. It’s not really a plan that works.”

Of course. And conservatives, being what they are, would delay evicting your nonagenarian grandma from the care center until a nice January blizzard. Just to make the point more vividly. Gurneys in the snow banks. What a photo op.

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Both sides bring considerable financial lunacy to the tax debate.  Democrats argue that lower business rates will mean higher residential rates. Quite true. Republicans say,"So what?" although in much subtler terms and accompanied by various plans to delay and disguise the rape of the smaller taxpayer.

Neither likes to soil its hands with the ultimate solution to confiscatory  property taxes. Which is, broadly sketched, to ravish goofy spending programs, swinging sabres and thrusting spears with all the fervor of a Mongol horde riding down a Crimean village.

True, school districts might have to do way with a few administrators who never deal with an actual student from one year to the next.  Cities and towns would face survival without the services of a a third-assistant deputy  zoning administrator. Other horrors would likewise exist, but, in the end, the more lightly taxed proletarian might no longer need to pick his neighbor's pocket to finance great-gram's bedroom.

... or even above the fold

Fox news hired Dick Morris this morning to tell us who should run under Romney.

Rubio, he said. No one else.

The Fox chatterer said, but, but, but, Rubio isn't experienced. He's just a first-term senator...

The ultimate question

The GOP governor is coming back to the neighborhood Saturday. He'll join our two local GOP legislators for "Eggs and Issues" -- one of those little confabs where the lawmakers try to persuade a skeptical dozen or so people that know WTF they're talking about. It's usually an informal thing with no ground rules other than common courtesy and a bit of Iowa nice.

But the governor is expected to be a big draw. Organizers booked a bigger room and limited attendance to 100 subjects.* They also changed the ground rules. Questions must be written.  The emcee will read them from the podium.

Leading to a pleasant little fantasy. I would write and slip into the middle of  stack, "Sir, why did you give such a bullshit answer to the last question?"

Update: Turns out there will be two meetings. The other one will admit 250.

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*How's that for political savvy? They don't call it the stupid party for nothing.

Stupid is as stupid votes

The headline poses the question: "How much do voters know."

The answer: Not much. Little enough, in fact, to send sentients whimpering to their beds.

Reporter Alexander Burns presents the case more gently:

"...Add up that litany of contradictory, irrational or simply silly opinions, and it’s enough to make a political professional suspect the electorate is, well, not entirely sophisticated about the choices it’s facing in 2012.

But not always too gently:

“The first lesson you learn as a pollster is that people are stupid,” said Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm.


The rest of the Politico report expands the theme, and folks should read the whole thing if they are interested in the burning issue of the day: "Why are things so  TARFU?"

Super Tuesday

Romney won the cities, Santorum won the countryside, Gingrich won Georgia, and the Dutch make cheese.

Three scoundrels, alike in their lust to replace the sitting Scoundrel in Chief. Their differences reflect only marketing judgements as to which popular superstitions are most panderable in the amoral quest for fifty per cent plus one.

H.L. Mencken, from Dayton, Tennessee, on July 14, 1925:.


In his argument yesterday judge Neal had to admit pathetically that it was hopeless to fight for a repeal of the anti-evolution law. The Legislature of Tennessee, like the Legislature of every other American state, is made up of cheap job-seekers and ignoramuses. The Governor of the State is a politician ten times cheaper and trashier. It is vain to look for relief from such men. If the State is to be saved at all, it must be saved by the courts. For one, I have little hope of relief in that direction, despite Hays' logic and Darrow's eloquence. Constitutions, in America, no longer mean what they say. To mention the Bill of Rights is to be damned as a Red.

---

If asked, Mencken would surely have agreed that secular superstitions exist. Free money. The nobility of pre-emptive war. Widely diffused responsibility for individual actions.

I don't know if he would praise Ron Paul, but I think that, at a minimum, he would concede that Paul's ideas are not those of an ignoramus, a word he would have found accurate in describing the Others.

Speaking of civil discourse...

Ron Paul finishes second in Washington and the local press reports;

 Attending his first caucus at the Labor Temple in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, Dillon Smith, 31, vowed to write in Paul's name no matter who is on the ballot in November...


Good for you, Dillon. And it isn't a "wasted" vote. It is a statement of enlightened disgust, of which we have too few.


"I would rather die than vote for any of the other candidates," said Smith,...


That may be carrying things further than necessary. You could just move to another country, like maybe Malawi, where all of our over-the-hill celebrity sex sirens lived and adopted babies during the eight years of the Bush Administration.


... because the country needs someone who will "basically slit the throat of the federal government."


Attention all aromatherapy clinics in the Los Angeles-Frisco corridor!   Surely you understand that Dillon is speaking metaphorically and has not demanded ventilating any actual human jugulars.

Five neighbors who showed up from his precinct also supported Paul and voted 6-0 to elect Smith as a delegate to an upcoming legislative-district convention.


On the other hand, you never know. If I were a thug bent on violence, I think I'd avoid taking my jugular to Seattle's Belltown neighborhood.

Iowa Gun Rights Constitutional Amendment

The language finally approved is here.  It would arguably affirm the strongest self-defense rights in the country.

Procedure: An Iowa Constitutional Amendment must be approved by both house and senate in two sessions separated by an election, i.e., two "General Assemblies" in our jargon. Then it must be approved by voters. The next step for this one is the senate where Democrats control things this year. Next is passage -- in identical form --  in the 2013 or 2014 session.

O. Kay Henderson, news director of Radio Iowa and a savvy reporter, says senate passage is unlikely. That may be slightly strong. Two years ago the conventional wisdom ruled out passage of shall-issue because of a Democrat senate and governor. But that was also an election year, and anti-gun lawmakers took a second look at citizen sentiment. They had a sudden epiphany revealing that shall-issue was a very statesmanlike policy indeed.   We'll see.

Dear CNN, Fox, and MSNBC

Even devoted political freaks are tired of it. Our tolerance for drama contrived from the flimsiest "analysis" has been exceeded. And we haven't even come  to the big primaries yet.

Why don't you send all your anchors and common taters home for a while? After the votes are counted, tell us who won. Meanwhile put up some old Daffy Duck cartoons. See if we can tell the difference.

Ron Paul Weds Mitt Romney, they say

(Caution: Long and political, a reply to my oldest friend, the Iowa kid  now  running the philosophy department of a university in one of the New England SSRs.  Our political discussions go back decades. He cited a Seattle Times article addressing the gossip about a Paul/Romney alliance. The elisions represent strictly personal stuff,  along with a thing or two about your humble scribe which hardly anyone would believe anyway. Using your delete key at his point in time would not offend me.)

---
Hi ....,

Can of worms. 

I'd be surprised to learn  Paul and Romney shook hands in a green room somewhere. (EDIT: meaning shook hands to seal a deal.)  However, I revert (counting coup) to a position I took back around Iowa Caucus time  when  Michele and the others floated the notion that Paul would become a third-party candidate and thus guarantee a second Obama term.  I wrote that it would not happen for a number of reasons, including his desire to keep Rand positioned for greater things in the GOP.  I'm sure  his personal agenda still includes a mighty desire to make his son White-House viable in '16 or beyond.

Paul's alleged kid-gloves treatment of Romney could rest on this premise: "Santorum will NOT become president. Romney MIGHT, though the odds are long. Therefore a non-aggression pact -- however tacit and muted -- with Romney is more likely to keep the Paul family name burnished in Republican circles."

One of the flaws in my reasoning is its assumption that a Romney who loses to Obama would continue to wield useful power in the party.  He might or might not. It depends on how well he can hang on to his support from Wall Street -- the debt industry, the Republican "Establishment"  -- after failing to oust Obama.

More immediately, the Romney perspective  by now must include the possibility of a brokered convention where even a handful of Paul delegates could be decisive. There's no reason for Mitt to further anger anti-statist thinkers and activists prior to the convention,  however much he might fear and detest them. Strange bedfellows, etc.

Even more immediately, analysis of this race won't be any easier after Michigan and Arizona. Absent a large surprise, we won't know a Hell of a lot more about the relative Romney/Santorum prospects than we do now. 

Aside: Rand's comment that he'd be honored to be asked to serve as No. 2 to Romney was stupid.

Elsewhere in the septic tank, Obama probably will win, but he's on thin ice. He might, therefore,  determine it politically unwise to bomb Iran and Syria -- and shit, for all I know,  another sandy draft choice or two to be named later -- before the second week of November.  (What, a closet Muslim bombing professing Muslims!  Why not? Muslims have been killing one another centuries. :) ) 

So have Christians, come to think of it. Maybe others, too, but I'm not too hip on the history of the Buddhist wars.

---

I almost certainly won't go to Tampa. ... but my contacts in the RNC and among the campaigns are by now non-existent, so I couldn't get close enough to the real decision making processes to even hear them clearly.  Why spend three or four thousand or more to mingle with varnished hair and Florsheim wingtips? The better part of wisdom is knowing when one has transitioned from barely-was to complete has-been. Too, my resolve to avoid crowds larger than  50,000 people remains intact.

---

Winter is making a last gasp in your old home land. We're facing a few days of general sky dumps -- snow, sleet, rain, but the long-range forecasters are beginning to remark on the growing power of the sun to usher in our annual hemi-global warming.  Bring it on. I'm tired of wearing socks. I want to go out in the fields and shoot dirt clods.  I want to launch the canoe and sneak up on yellow fluffy goslings  for photographic  purposes. I want to sit on my dock and catch  three perch for lunch. When all this occurs I'm afraid you'll have to stand in for me  as chief watch dog of the peoples' liberties.

...  has just become a National Merit  Scholar, a finalist. He's applying to the ... where he hopes to learn enough physics to explain the cosmos to Stephen Hawking. :)

...

Best,

Jim 

(This might be stripped of some of the personal content  and blogged; don't feel ambitious enough to try to dream up original content)

Learning Politics with Travis McGee

Our friend John D. MacDonald pauses in his narrative of the search for Bix Bowie's fate in the Oaxacan highlands. Travis and Meyer are interested in the scene, a high mesa marked with anthropological remnants of a tough and ancient people.  John D. permits Enelio, their bright new Mexican friend, to explain. (N.B. The term "priest" needs to be read in its meaning in Meso-American culture before the Spanish invasion. The priests were also the temporal masters -- the polticians, the Obamas, Santorums, Gingriches, and Romneys, among many other latter-day names.):

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"Here is how it was.  Five, six, seven hundred years ago, these mountain people who had been led into this place by the priests and the soldiers, they cimbed to that place that you see, and they made offerings of food, and they worshipped. They bult the temples and they dug the wells, carried the stones, made the pottery, cut the thatch. But the priests got too far away from the people. They thought they owned the people forever. They lost common understanding. So one day the people went up to the high places and killed the priests and killed the guards and pulled down the temples and never went back. ... They just got tired of slave life, of catering to the demands of priests for food and women and children to train, and tired of work that became more meaningless to them. They went up and killed them and put and end to it...".


---


This little offering is not meant as an immediate call to hone the swords and hoist Mencken's Black Flag. It is a suggestion that authoritarianism has its ultimate punishments.

---

From Dress Her in Indigo, the 1987 Fawcett printing, p. 95.

The Frontrunner Ron Paul (Caution: Adult Content)

Now will you forgive us for imposing Rick Santorum on you? Even though his primary campaign theme is a strict "One Climax, One Kid" rule?

The competent Ann Selzer has just published a poll of Iowa voters, and our "unelectable" Ron Paul whips every other GOPer in a face-to-face against His Ineptness Barack Obama.

I wouldn't break out the champagne just yet. The results seem to reflect more revulsion with President Obama and the other Republicans than any great enchantment with our offbeat ol' Grandpa Paul.  But a guy can be heartened to see hints of a friendlier attitude toward Constitutional government.

Paul beats the president by 7 points. Santorum beats him by 4 and Romney wins by 2. Poor Newt loses; Mr. Obama sends him home to Callista by 14 points.

From Hawkeye lips to God's ears, eh?

(There is rain on our parade. Paul's unfavorables total 41 points against Santorum's 33.  The others' hate numbers are worse, 51 for Mitt and 65 for Newt.  



---

For a couple of reasons you probably want to read the whole thing, including links to the polling geekery. My brief report here is undoubtedly colored by a bias against hinging a presidential race on regulating the reproductive habits of every Joe and Sally Sixpack in the land. Likewise by disgust with the intense debate about how manly -- or bogus -- Mitt looks in his new starched and ironed jeans.  Too, my mind may still be fogged by the pleasant little fantasy  about going  rock climbing with Rachel.

What a sexy night it was

Santorum won big on purity platform. "God tells me that you must never wear a condom."

He was running against an Obama position. "Rubber it up, sucka. Don't sweat the money. Your homies gonna pay the drug store."

It's the  battle of the Trojan Whores.
.

The adulation of Ron Paul

...and while I'm on the subject, let me tip my hat to our grumpy hermit out in the western desert.

"Surely there must be some golden mean, in which a person can be credulous enough to still have faith in the political process, without going completely moonbat in the veneration of an individual."

That's Joel's reaction -- spot on, if you ask me -- to some nincompoop's screed linking Ron Paul to the Second Coming.
.

The Space-Out Coast

Down in Florida last night the best line of the cage fight was nonchalantly delivered by Ron Paul. "...that debate doesn't interest me very much."

He was addressing the unzipped front-runners, two-handedly swinging their members at one another about whose investments were least horrible.

Paul's contribution was his usual, that is, consistent view that (a) presidential debates ought to be about policy and (b)  no policy will work well until Washington learns arithmetic and  weans itself from ever-flowing tit of fiat money. That actually got a passing reaction from  Mitt and Newt, essentially, "Good point in a way, (pause) but my balls really are brazenbigger than Mitt's (or Newt's.)"

Welcome to the great national dialog as it is understood by most of the GOP and all -- every one -- of the famous heads who agree that the morning-after headline must proclaim that Mitt added three inches.

Down with sex

I see by the news that Mitt is releasing his tax dope tomorrow. Yippie. The Republic is saved.

Even better, Newt might have to come clean about how much history he taught to Freddie and Fanny in return for the  million-six.

Together that's about all we need to know to make an informed choice about who should get to control the nuke codes and the number of Federal Reserve Cartoons Ben Bernanke must print.

I know all this because I have spent an unconscionable amount of time in front of the new, cheap flat screen watching the sexiest people in the world tell me so.

Ideas? We don't need to talk about no steenken ideas.

Booooring.

---

While I would miss ogling Mika and whazhername -- Mrs. Newt the Third --  some mornings, I nevertheless propose to amend the Constitution.

We must require that candidates for public office, their spouses, and, especially, electric teevee "newspersons" to be drawn from the ranks of the truly ugly. Further, they must be adjudged charmless by a jury of their peers.

By thus ending the constant titillation of our glands on the pretext of following a great national dialog, we might begin the process of thinking about how to choose those leaders who will steal the fewest possible numbers of our dollars and our liberties.

To this end I announce formation of a national committee to promote it. The honorary co-chairpersons are to be Josh Hartnett and Paris Hilton.

Let's run 'em through the chute again, LeRoy

Re: Iowa Caucuses 2012

We grow hogs pretty good, but it sure shames us we can't count 'em.

The Dynasty Lives

A fresh Kennedy kid is trying to decide if the fate of the Republic depends on offering himself for service in America's high councils.

He's Joe . He says he's earned  Barney Frank's seat because, in part, of his "experience." Said experience consists of a tax-paid vacation in the Peace Corps and fully 30 months as county prosecutor.  Take that, Iran!

Yes, Joe is one of those Kennedys, and in a properly governed nation that would be automatically disqualifying. Consanguinity, however slight, should be sufficient to complete the offense.

Even Big Brother says something smart once in a great while

For an inglorious instant this morning I was Winston Smith. The Inner Party had fulfilled its threat.  I loved Newt Gingrich.

"(Mitt,) can we get rid of the pious baloney?"

FLASH ... Romney Captures SoL, Newt nabs second, Paul pales

Freedom did not shake her lovely tresses in my village of Smugleye-on-Lake. Our good Dr. Paul captured 11 votes of the 77 cast for 14.28 per cent.

The SoL tab:

Romney 22
Gingrich 20
Santorum 17
Paul 11
Perry 4
Bachmann 1

Further reports as they become available should your reporter remain awake. Being with that many people (about a thousand; it was a county-wide doin's) makes his butt tired, and the sensation often rapidly disseminates itself thoughout the other bodily parts.

Iowa Poll Results

Our libertarian is No. 2, two points behind Mitt's hair. It's the famous statistical tie.

Santorum is 3rd at 15. Newt is No. 4 with 13.7. Another stat tie.

In Order:

Romney 24

Paul 22

Santorum 15

Gingrich 13.7

Perry 11

Bachmann 7

Hunstman NR