The storm of death redux again

This is about the first excuse of the winter for the official mommydotguv weather forecasters to predict death and disaster. So far, I am amazed at the rhetorical restraint the NWS is showing. Reduced to a "takeaway" (what an odious word), the weather guys and gals  seem to be advising me that I have a reasonable chance  of surviving the next 72 hours. Ordinarily their red headlines make me wonder if my will needs changing.

This makes me feel good but also like a citified wuss. I don't really need to do much. Keep a few splits of oak handy to the fireplace.  Kick New Dog Libby out of the soft chair closest to said fireplace. Decide whether to go with chili, spaghetti sauce, or  barbecue pork loin in the crock pot.  Move the more dependable truck out into a clear area of the yard. (The truck is insured but the camper isn't, so the fall of an ice-laden oak branch thereon would be financially inconvenient.)

A couple-three hundred miles west of me, where the storm is worse,  lives a a better man. This guy -- an obvious  survivalist  --  got ready by positioning  the 4x4  pickup,  prepping his team of horses, getting his cows in a cuddly place, and -- I swear it's true --  hoping his shoulder pain lets up enough so he can go riding his colt through the wintry Armageddon. Ride 'em, Cowboy.

(sigh) Comparatively, Jinglebob makes me feel like I should be wearing white bucks,  lime green slacks, a pink silk shirt, and a yellow ascot, standing around a country club bar,  bitching about the servant problem.

From the days when she merely aspired to maidenhood

Offered in compensaton to readers bored with the previous post on dreary politics:

Or, if you like your girls with guns:

---

And lest female readers feel slighted, a little light porn from a second perspective  is served. 

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)

Hope and Change not having worked too well, His Ineptness desperately  switches to T and A.

Hello Eva. (This one is for you political freaks.)

And Hello again. (And this for all other leering old leches.)

(Waiting for our crack media to secure a reaction from Michelle.)