Dear Mr. Buffet

Why don't you just go ahead and write the check?
.

The Tenth Amendment

Mitt Romney has learned that the Tenth is useful if you're trying to squirm through charges that your Massachusetts health-care horror was the president's instruction manual for Obamacare.

Mitt is still having trouble with snickering citizens who say, "Oh yeah? You mean govermentalized medicine (or anything else) is okay if we just 
do it one state at a time?" 


Politicians love selective reading of the Constitution. Yep, the final article of the Bill of Rights does say powers not delegated to the feds "are reserved to the states...". They tend to ignore the final words: "...or to the people."

That leads to the Mitty view that it's fine to jail your citizens for refusing to buy health insurance, just as long as it's a state prison rather than a federal one.

Oh well, at least that act of the GOP follies is reminding folks there is such a thing as the Tenth Article of the Bill of Rights. Maybe something will happen to call attention the Ninth.

Pawlenty out and Sad Fred Karger In; Iowa Caucuses 2012

No one is surprised Pawlenty withdrew. He just did it sooner than expected. Your indispensable guide to presidential candidates is updated. Give me reasonable odds and I'll wager T-Paw is looking at a challenge to Al Franken.

I'm also adding a guy I knew slightly in the Reagan years. He Fred Karger, a gay Republican political "consultant" and operative. I ran into him yesterday and came as close to feeling sorry for him as I can for any hustling aspirant to the public trough. At least he had balls enough to stand right next to the political evangelicals' big tent, talk about being gay,  and hand out post card promos, each with a small jelly bean taped on.  

One Saturday in Ames

The Ron Paul registration tent a few minutes after it opened.

Paul forces have discovered the usefulness of the carnival approach toward saving America. The little kids mobbed this one, pulling themselves laboriously up the mountain for a quick slide down. The point to be impressed on their elders was that two centuries of hard work can be erased by a couple of decades' over-borrowing.  

The Midway --gimme caps, fried food,  free pop, and your choice of petitions to sign. (I limited myself to one, for constitutional carry.)

Somebody in the Perry camp got to feeling uneasy that he had absolutely no presence and that his announcement timing was a gob of spit in the Iowa face. So they hired an untalented middle-school kid to decorate a van. This is about as good as it got for Perry here.