Liberal friend: we deserve a country where our politicians aren't bought and sold by corporations.

Me: just labor unions, right?

Questions I'd like to ask politicians

You ever get sick of the "anything but a straight answer" approach from our elected leaders (and those who want to be our elected leaders)?

Well, if I were one-on-one with various politicians and had somehow gotten the opportunity to pump them full of truth serum, here are some questions I would ask.

Every Republican primary contestant:
Who will be the first Justice you appoint to the Supreme Court and why?

After you repeal ObamaCare, what will be the second thing you do to get the economy going again?

Mitt Romney:
Can you demonstrate the key differences between RomneyCare and ObamaCare in one or two soundbites, seeing as that's all the average voter has time for? And if you can't, doesn't that mean that, as Rick Santorum said, that ObamaCare will be "off the table" if/when you become the nominee?

On a similar note, can you explain what "venture capitalism" and "blind trusts" are is without boring or insulting anyone who makes less than $40,000 a year?

Given that you are part of the 1%, that class warfare will be a huge theme of Obama's re-election campaign, and that Obama has a one-billion-dollar smear machine ready to go, your claim to be the most electable candidate is tenuous at best. What are the top three ways your team will combat Obama's class warfare and smear tactics?

Newt Gingrich:
Can you explain why you supported an individual mandate in the 1990s (and apparently the 2000s as well), only to suddenly change your mind about it recently?

Precisely what service(s) did you provide for Freddie Mac? What did "consulting" entail?

Barack Obama:
Given that ObamaCare's unpopularity led to the Tea Party counter-revolution in 2010, and given your own reluctance to mention it as one of your administration's accomplishments, shouldn't it be repealed?

In precisely what way is our economic situation Bush's fault?

Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL):
In the year following your eleventh-hour tax hike, Illinois has had the greatest rise in unemployment in the nation. Shouldn't the tax hike be repealed?

I can't resist pointing this out: the picture of Romney in the ad for the anti-Romney film "Blood Money" is a better picture of him than the one in the "Let's Fight for the American We Love" pro-Romney ads.

Whoops.

Does Ron Paul Matter?

I'm no expert, but my guess is Paul's supporters can be divided into three groups: constitutional federalists, libertarian hippies, and people who just like Ron Paul. Of the three, only the former can be expected to vote for [a Republican] who isn't Ron Paul or his son.
-Me, a week or so ago.

I've looked back over some of my older posts and realized that if you were a Ron Paul supporter, you might think I'm slagging your hero a lot. I said he doesn't count as a candidate for the Not-Romney contest, and I gave an award for Favorite Quote From Someone Other Than Ron Paul at the most recent debate.

Fair enough. I did. I actually didn't mean any disrespect. I'll explain the quote thing first: Ron Paul's a virtual compendium of anti-government one-liners, so if I included his quotes in that contest, he'd almost always win. My favorite quote of that entire debate was either Ron Paul's line about sending politicians to the moon, or Ron Paul lightly ribbing Blitzer about age discrimination, or Ron Paul, well, being Ron Paul.

Why doesn't Ron Paul count as a candidate for the Not-Romney contest? Because when Santorum leaves the race, his supporters will go to Newt. If Newt leaves the race, his supporters will go to Santorum. If/when Ron Paul leaves the race, his supporters will... oh...

Well, as I insinuated in the quote at the top of the page, most of them will follow him into third-party oblivion (and if you're a Ron Paul fan and you're offended by that, well, sorry, but the third-party oblivion thing is true, and you are welcome to prove me wrong about the "follow him" part). The ones that don't? They're not going to go for the social conservative (Santorum) and I doubt they'll go for the big-idea big-government Gingrich. Romney's paid more lip service to federalism than Santorum and Gingrich combined; my guess is most of Paul's fans will go to him. That's why I think Ron Paul doesn't count as a potential Not-Romney.

Finally, does Ron Paul matter?

Oh, hell yes.

His presence on that stage is a reminder that people really do mean it when they say they want a smaller government, even if their spokesman is prone to the occasional bout of cantankerousness. And what a spokesman he is. You know in advance that every answer is going to be "reduce the size of the government" or "stop policing the world," and you still watch him go.

Florida

My first opinion, before I started reading everyone else's opinion, was that there was no clear winner of Florida's debate, and because of that, Gingrich was the loser.

Well, everyone else was much, much less kind to the former Speaker, which amuses me because I'm not even in his camp to begin with.

Before I get into everything, I suppose I should point out the last debate I watched was the one in Iowa, where Romney made his $10,000-bet gaffe, there were six candidates on the stage, and Rick Santorum looked like he was there just because he badly wanted to be Gingrich's VP. My, how times have changed.

Blitzer/CNN: I'll point this out every single time it comes up: I do not care about loaded questions, or perceived bias on the part of the moderator. We are going to have that in the general, and more than anything else, these debates really should be about the candidates proving that they're the best shot against Obama.

Blitzer was mostly effective and fair, neither letting Romney get away with not knowing about a radio ad he was running nor letting Gingrich get away without comment on Romney's taxes. The softball questions about first ladies and health records were appropriately timed and didn't distract too much from the main event.

While Blitzer mostly let candidates respond to each other's attacks, he also let a lot of bickering through when he could, as Santorum suggested, have moved on to other topics. Overall, if he could enforce time limits, I'd like to see him back in the general. Good show.

For the actual contestants, let's do this in the reverse order of how well I expect the candidates to do on Tuesday.

Ron Paul is going to come dead last in Florida because his supporters are mostly young people and Floridians are mostly old people. Despite that, he had a fantastic night. He only went into "Crazy Ron Paul Caricature Mode" once, when he got a bit muddled up in discussing the housing crisis. From joking about sending politicians to the moon, to pointing out that big government caused more problems than it solved, to challenging everyone else to a 25-mile bike ride through Texas, he was great.

I know people are concerned about a third-party run, especially since he's got so much more support this time around, but I love the fact that he's here, reminding us at every turn that the federal government is simply too big. He needs to find a suit jacket that fits him, though.

Rick Santorum has sanctimoniousness down to a T. He pummelled Romney on RomneyCare, demonstrating that the Mittster still doesn't have a good defense for it. He managed to out-Gingrich Gingrich when he lectured Blitzer and asked for a more relevant question.

Back in Iowa, he was one of four candidates competing for the Not-Romney slot and seemed more like a hanger-on than anything else. Now that the Not-Romney field is down to two (no, Ron Paul doesn't count), some people (including the version of me in a parallel world that never watched the Jacksonville debate) are expecting this relative lightweight to bow out sooner rather than later. Tonight he proved that wasn't going to happen. Biggest surprise of the evening: Captain Sweatervest was on fire when it came to foreign policy, demonstrating that he does in fact have the detailed know-how necessary to be President.

I don't actually have anything negative to say about his performance. I guess he won the debate, in that sense.

Newt Gingrich got punched early and hard and never really recovered. He tried to pull a repeat of his South Carolina stunt, and he utterly failed to stick the landing. He needed a win here to propel him to victory in Florida and keep his momentum up for the next three debate-less weeks, and he just didn't get it. On a "macro" level, he was the clear loser simply because he failed to win. His worst two moments, aside from when he tried to tell Blitzer that a question about Romney's taxes was stupid (and the crowd did not go wild), were when he doubled down on an ad he'd already pulled, and when he tried to talk money with Romney. (Never, ever, get into a debate about money with a businessman. You will lose, and Romney slapped him silly.)

Neither of those mistakes were particularly damnable, though, and he sparkled on foreign policy; one of my favorite parts of the evening came when both he and Romney looked the Palestinian in the eye and told him that the Palestinian leadership is the problem, not Israel.

But...

After the debate, he whined that the audience was stacked with Romney fans and that Romney misrepresented his (Romney's) stance on illegal immigration and why he voted Democrat in 1992. In reading his argument, I can only conclude that 1) Newt misrepresented Romney's stance on illegal immigration, and that 2) the former speaker is a crybaby.

Mitt Romney needs a Venn Diagram to explain the differences between RomneyCare and ObamaCare. The sooner he makes it, the better for him. (Though I guess that would require somebody to read ObamaCare, which would probably take them all of the primary season.) He also really needs to know which ads his campaign is airing.

On the plus side, Romney laid into Gingrich (a tad too overzealously, in my opinion), stole Gingrich's righteous-indignation mojo, wasn't ashamed of his wealth, refused to apologize for making money, and, though it was far from a perfect defense, he couched his defense of RomneyCare in economic terms. He also delivered my Favorite Line From Someone Other Than Ron Paul of the evening when he punctured Newt's immigration policy: "Our (illegal immigration) problem isn't fourteen million grandmothers."

Conclusion: Mister Inevitable is back; Florida is Romney's. And the Not-Romney crowd? You guys crowned Gingrich your champion way too early. Santorum has less baggage, is in a better position to attack Romney's weaknesses, and is clearly up to the task. (Would he do better than Newt against Obama? That's a different question.)

So now we have the ultimate paradox. The sooner Santorum leaves, the sooner Newt gets a sorely-needed boost. But at the same time, the sooner Santorum leaves, the sooner Romney's biggest weaknesses evaporate, at least for the primary.

How did it come to this?

This is me trying to be objective about the Republican front-runners. It shouldn't be too hard to go check my older posts and see which way I'm leaning.

A year and a half ago, right after the 2010 midterms, if you'd told me that in 2012 the Republican primary would be down to a multimillionaire who's apparently afraid to release his taxes, can't sound sincere to save his life, and runs away from every part of his one term as a governor except the part where he implemented the fore-runner to ObamaCare on one hand, and a populist megalomaniac who has lived in Washington DC for the last 33 years, has literally promised voters the moon, and couldn't represent family values if he tried on the other, I'd have laughed at you.*

"No, silly," I'd have said. "Look at the Tea Party! We're going to get a bona fide fiscal and social conservative, a bona fide anti-establishment outsider..."

Well, there's no point in going overboard with this thought experiment. Eventually, either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich will win the nomination and we'll be stuck with them for the rest of the campaign, and if we're very, very lucky, for the next four years.

*I should point out that this extremely long sentence is at least partially hyperbole. I'm dumbing things down and being mean to both candidates in order to make a point.

Under absolutely no circumstances should anyone else get in the race. It's too late. You had your chance. You were reluctant to jump in before, you're way behind the others in terms of fundraising and organization, and you'll simply never overcome inertia. Sorry, Tea Party. Your options are now between Mitt Romney, the guy who governed like a liberal but now at least pays lip service to federalism and has a strong business record, or Newt Gingrich, a man so keen to grab the Reagan mantle that he'll trample over Reagan's 11th commandment, a man who is the absolute definition of "the establishment" no matter what his cheerleaders want you to think, and a man who, again, has literally promised voters the moon. That part was not hyperbole. Newt Gingrich wants to build a moon-base. Has he seen the national debt recently?

We all know that Caesar Obama cannot run on his record, mostly because his record smells like the aftermath of an Occupy protest. So he's going to run on class warfare, yes, but also on the notion that, as bad as his first term was (not that he'll use those words), a Romney or Gingrich presidency would be so much worse.

And both men have a ton of baggage, this is true. Romney's baggage is professional: RomneyCare (actually not a liability once he starts articulating the differences between it and ObamaCare), Bain Capital (ultimately, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out, did more good than harm), and, um... a strange reluctance to release tax records that show he gave 14% of his income to charity?

Hey, Mitt, who do you think you are, Barack Obama? You think you can hide something (like a birth certificate* or a college thesis) and pretend it's a non-issue? Because, um, you're not, and your opponent isn't the hapless John McCain either.

*Yes, Jennifer, Barack Obama has a birth certificate. Yes, he released it. Eventually. Not that he was in any way pressured by the media to do so, which is kind of my point.

My point, Mitt, is that we know you're rich. That's not a surprise. You paid more in taxes than most of us make in a year. Congratulations. You were born rich and you got richer, and that's in no way something to be ashamed of. The easiest way for you to make a non-issue out of your wealth is to not try and hide it. In fact, next time someone brings up your tax returns, point out that you gave 14% of your income to charity! That's impressive, and it pokes holes in the notion that the 1% (of which you are a member) are a bunch of greedy, self-interested pigs! (And if someone whines about how 14% isn't much, ask them how much of their income they gave to charity.) Point out that, in calling for the elimination of tax deductions, the president is declaring war on charity! Weave it in to an anti-big-government argument that people are dying to hear.

Newt's baggage is a mixture of both: he's got two divorces, which is personal, but he's been on the big-government side of more crazy schemes than I care to name.

Newt: call off the moon-base. Let's get that debt under control. In fact, reign in the crazy all around, and maybe get around to actually explaining to us why you supported a nationwide individual mandate, imposed at the federal level, back in the 90s but suddenly oppose it now. Like Romney's wealth, your messy personal life is old news; unlike Romney, you seem to have a firm grasp on how to deal with any Democrats who want to beat that dead horse. So good job there.

Oh, and don't threaten to stop attending debates if the audience can't cheer. Debates are what's keeping your campaign afloat. Your showstopping performace in South Carolina won you that state. So we know you're bluffing when you talk about walking away.

Politics: 3rd week of January

Not covering SOTU in this post. (Not watching SOTU; have better things to do than listen to President "I won" campaigning for re-election against a do-nothing Congress.)

Besides, I offer this quote from Mitt Romney as a pre-emptive rebuttal to anything Caesar says tonight:

"If this election is a bidding war for who can promise more benefits, then I'm not your president. You have that president today."

Next up:

Union pensions. Apparently, say defenders of fat public-employee pensions, the reason for the big, big discrepancy between public pensions and private pensions is all due to the fact that 48% of public employees have college degrees compared to 22% of private employees.

So, um, who's paying for those degrees? Just wondering.

Okay, back to the Republican primary.

I stumbled across this title of an op-ed somewhere on the web: "Gingrich defends capitalism while Romney defends Romney." This was right around the same time that Gingrich and Perry started ripping into Romney over the conduct of Bain Capital, calling what Romney did "vulture capitalism." Sorry, that's defending capitalism now?

On a similar note, I keep reading that Gingrich is the "outsider" whereas Romney is the "establishment" candidate. By what twisted logic is the former Speaker of the House, a man who has lived the last 33 years in Washington, less of an establishment candidate than a man who served one term as governor?

Some words about South Carolina. The debate immediately before the election mattered, and was instrumental in tipping the state to Gingrich. Naturally, Romney has... agreed to do more debates! I like to think that Romney is a competent campaigner, because by God we need one to run against Obama, but this isn't helping.

Anyway, about that debate. Apparently Gingrich was on fire. I didn't see it. I read about it afterward. The first question was about Gingrich's ex-wife, and Gingrich's response was "how dare you?"

As I said, I didn't see Gingrich's response. I read about it afterwards. And my first thought was: we already have a petulant whiner in the White House right now. Why should we run another one against him?

Look, by all accounts Gingrich won that debate hands-down. I don't dispute that. But I'm getting a massive style-over-substance vibe from him, and we already have a style-over-substance guy in the White House now. A Gingrich-Obama debate would surely be a firecracker, but it would look a lot like something Shakespeare once said: "He speaks, yet he says nothing."

Here's the thing: when the other candidates and their PACs were attacking Romney's record at Bain, I welcomed it. You can check; I don't change the substance of any post with a "politics" tag after I post it (I have toned down the rhetoric at least once, and that was sometime last year). Caesar's going to use it in the general, so it's a valid point.

Don't think for a moment that Caesar's not going to use Gingrich's divorces in the general. And "how dare you," for all the righteous indignation that Gingrich can marshal, simply isn't a valid response.

It worked in South Carolina because a conservative audience was sick of liberal questions. But liberal questions are what we'll get in the general, and we'll have moderate, independent audiences. "How dare you" simply will not go over as well with them.

The top 5 best death scenes in science fiction

SPOILERS AHEAD

Honorable mentions:
Laura Roslin, Ellen Ripley (yes, really), Darth Vader

5) The T-800 (Terminator 2)
The thumbs-up, and then the robo-vision blacking out... There's a reason T2 is better than the original, and it's wordlessly stated in this scene.

4) The Third Doctor
"A tear, Sarah Jane? Don't cry. While there's life, there's..."

Arguably, Jon Pertwee is the only Doctor ever who got a truly dignified death scene (the again, only he, Davison and Tennant got farewell stories that were explicitly about their Doctors dying, and the other two had problems). Hartnell just kind of fell over, Troughton didn't get a proper death, Tom fell off a bridge, Davison was upstaged by Nicola Bryant's cleavage, Colin and McCoy are covered on the other list, McGann didn't get a death scene, Eccleston wasn't around long enough for us to care, and Tennant's Rage Against the Heavens (and subsequent Grand Farewell Tour) robbed his moment of any potential gravitas.

And what a death scene Pertwee got.

3) Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (first time)
I don't care if you didn't for one moment believe Starbuck was really dead (well, actually, I do, which is why this isn't higher on the list). Immediately before her Viper explodes, Starbuck gets surrounded by a white light and closes her eyes. Cut to Kid-Kara against a pure white background, smiling and closing her eyes. My words aren't doing the scene justice, and I'm tearing up just thinking about it.

2) Spock
I was going to disqualify the pointy-eared Vulcan at first, because it doesn't stick. Then I realized that Starbuck was going to make this list, and decided not to argue semantics.

1) Roy Batty
No, you go look up the full speech.

The top 5 most undignified, anticlimatic deaths in science fiction

SPOILERS AHEAD

Dishonorable mentions:
Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (2nd time) and the Fourth Doctor. But this list is already overdosed with crappy Doctor deaths, and Starbuck at least got a very moving (if slightly unbelievable) death scene the first time she died. (As much as I revere Ron Moore, he's responsible for two deaths that make the list in addition to Starbuck's dishonorable mention. Ouch. On the plus side, he's also got an honorable mention and a solid entry on the "good death" list.)

5) Sam Anders
I know this one is going to be controversial. Or at least it would if anyone read this blog. I love Battlestar Galactica as much as the next nerd, but this was painful to watch.

It wasn't the death itself (which occurs just offscreen, as the most beautiful rendition of the original Battlestar theme Bear McCreary ever arranged plays) that bugs me about our favorite Pyramid-player-turned-resistance-fighter-slash-Final-Five-Cylon's demise. It's everything that led up to it. Sam was randomly shot in the head during a mutiny, spouted off the biggest infodump in the show's history, and then turned into a vegetable.

I know this plot was invented at the last minute because Michael Trucco was nearly killed in a car crash during the writers' strike, but... badass Sam Anders got randomly shot and turned into a vegetable. Then they stuck him in a tank and made him fly a ship into the sun. Not cool.

4) Boba Fett
He's not higher on this list because he's more popular with the Star Wars fanboys who take every single Star Wars novel as canon, in which case this death doesn't even count.

So a blind Han Solo accidentally whacks Boba's jetpack, causing him to rocket headfirst into the sail barge and fall into a giant ahem in the sand. Talk about your accidental discharges.

3) The Seventh Doctor
The cleverest Time Lord who ever lived doesn't bother to check his scanner before he steps out of the TARDIS into a hail of gunfire. Then he dies on the operating table because his doctor's too stupid to figure out he has two hearts. Amazingly, Sylvester McCoy started his run on Who on an even worse note...

2) The Sixth Doctor
The Sixth Doctor was certainly unpopular, but... the TARDIS gets shot down, he bangs his head on the console, he dies. Colin Baker refused to return for a proper regeneration story (not that anybody blames him), so we got this turd of a death instead.

1) Captain James T. Kirk
"Bridge on the Captain."

Wikiprotesta

It seems that virtually every post I write these days has to be prefaced by some sort of caveat or another. So here's the one for this post:

I do not now and will not ever support any piece of legislation that allows the government to supress free speech without very, very, very* good reason. And, online speech should be the easiest form of expression to protect.

*I need like a super-italicize button to emphasize this. The only two things I can think of that would warrant government intervention on the internet are 1) something like WikiLeaks, where sensitive information is being handed to America's enemies. That's called espionage, and there are laws against it. 2) websites that exist solely to distributed copyrighted information without a dime of it going to its creators. That's called intellectual property theft, and there are also laws against that.

Oh, and I'm no saint either. I've never bought a Beatles album in my life, but I've got every good album (plus Beatles for Sale) in my iTunes library because of my best friend. But here's the funny thing; I got all the physical discs from him and ripped them onto my computer. You're never going to be able to outlaw that kind of activity.

Having said that...

In an ideal world, I'd be an author. Now in this brave new world we've made for ourselves, the print industry's going to be gone in a few years and everything's going to be online. Copy-protection is not foolproof. I don't imagine it would be very difficult for someone to illegally distribute e-books in much the same way that, for example, people can illegally distribute MP3s.

So online piracy is, believe it or not, a dicey, double-edged sword.

And, despite that platitude about online speech being easy to protect, child pornography is just as illegal online as it is in print, and that's as it should be.

I think that the intentions behind SOPA and PIPA - namely, the protection of intellectual property, without which our economy simply cannot function - were good, even if the end results are horribly controversial. And let's face it, 60-year-old senators who need to be told that the internet is "a series of tubes" should not be in charge of protecting intellectual property online. (This begs the question of who should, and the guy who's against every alphabet agency out there except the FBI and the CIA doesn't have a very good answer for you, sorry.)

And that's where this post should really begin.

As I said, legislation that allows the government to "black out" websites is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and should never pass Congress. It should be protested. I don't have any problem with that. You want to protect intellectual property, fine the people who are stealing and illegally proliferating it.

My problem is the precedent these protests are setting.

My guess is that Jimmy Wales and the other Wikipedia honchos are not apolitical. Yesterday's emergency is today's normality. What's the next piece of legislation Wikipedia will protest?

I recently started watching Caprica again (mostly because I got back into Doctor Who and suckered myself into watching Underworld, and anything compares favorably to that). There's a pivotal scene in which Daniel Graystone tells his board that they can't expect to make a profit off the holobands anymore. He's covering his ass, of course, and is about to unveil the Cylon, but there's a point that he makes that's worth repeating.

The kids expect it to be free. That market's gone.

I know my generation is the most liberal generation in America's history. We grew up after the Cold War was over, so we never learned how bad the Soviet Union was. It's why 53% of the millennials still approve of President Obama's performance when only 45% of the country overall does.

We expect it to be free. We don't like to play by the old rules.

The FBI shut down Megaupload. Anonymous responded by taking down half the government sites on the internet (hyperbole). Silly Uncle Sam; the internet is their turf, didn't you know?

We, the mob of the internet, are used to it being (more or less) totally unregulated.

This is only the first battle (unless you're old enough to remember Napster).

The war will not be pretty.

Political Round-up: 2nd week of January

This is an ongoing series of my own right-leaning/wing (delete according to political preferences) commentary on various political issues, mostly related to President Obama, the Republican primary and the upcoming presidential election.

Conservatives can't make up their minds about Romney. Yes, the man has baggage. So does every other candidate on the field. Yes, Romney has a liberal track record.

Here's my own two cents on elections in general. The qualities that you look for in a candidate do not automatically include the ability to govern. It's perverse, but it's true. Since at least 1980, elections have been won by candidates who beat their opponents in two categories: the ability to communicate their message effectively, and the ability to rally an enthusastic band of followers. In these two respects Reagan and Obama are remarkably similar. H.W. largely rode Reagan's coattails, but it helps that his Democratic opponent was an imbecile. Clinton was nowhere near either Reagan or Obama, but again, his opponents were weak. Likewise, the ineloquent W scored well enough against Gore and Kerry, but Obama would have blown him out of the water the way he did McCain. McCain lacked both of these qualities, and that was why he lost; it wasn't because he was a moderate squish, or because he picked an awful VP candidate, but rather simply because he was wrong.

Now, as far as the Republican field goes, there are only two candidates who have a particularly loyal, enthusiastic following. I have to include Romney in this category, simply because his supporters never jumped ship the way Gingrich's/Perry's/Cain's/Bachmann's did. The obvious champion of the "enthusiastic following" competition is of course Ron Paul, the only one of those candidates with a true personality cult.

And as far as communication goes, Paul is simple, direct, and often far too blunt. His ideas are also way outside the mainstream, and it's going to be very hard for his followers to galvanize any hardcore social conservatives* or economic liberals. Romney's waffling hasn't hurt him that badly, and he's already given me a few reasons to vote for him that aren't "he's not Barack Obama."

These two things, communication and enthusiasm, are the reasons why Romney and Paul are doing so well, and why Romney will do well in the general.

*I recognize that Romney's having trouble with social conservatives as well. Still, his numbers seem good in both South Carolina and Florida. And I'd rather support a Mormon who acts in accordance with basic religious convictions than a mainstream Christian who does not.**

**(Edit 1-15) Er... on re-reading that last line it looks like I'm attacking Paul, when the barbs are meant for Gingrich and Obama.

Conservatives are attacking Romney's record at Bain. No doubt Obama is going to do this as well. Now, some of us, especially those who support Romney, love to point out the hypocrisy of Gingrich's super-PAC attacking free-market capitalism. Well, look, you bet your bottom dollar that Caesar Obama is going to attack free-market capitalism in the general, so my point from last time stands: the more chances Romney gets to respond, the better.

Besides, remember that whole "birth certificate" thing back in 2008? A Hillary staffer trumped that up during the primary, and Republicans fell for it, hook, line and sinker. We beat the story to death. By the time the general rolled around, the independents didn't care anymore.

Now, yes, the media is overwhelmingly on Caesar's side, but We the People are not nearly as stupid as our actions in 2008 would have you believe. We get sick of stuff being flogged to death. This is why Charlie Sheen is not front-page news right now.

I welcome the notion that Obama will run on class warfare in the upcoming election. Let him. Let the 2012 presidential election be a vote between free markets and class warfare, between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Whoever wins, we'll get what we deserve.

Gingrich et al are taking Romney's "fire people" quote out of context. Boo-hoo. This is politics, children. Point out that the quote has been taken out of context (and explain it to your independent friends), and move on.

Caesar wants another debt ceiling raise. Well, bypass Congress to get it. But then don't campaign against a do-nothing Congress, because it's certainly not tying your hands any.

Caesar thinks his recess appointments are constitutional. So apparently now the (Democrat-controlled) Senate needs to check in with Caesar Obama to make sure that they are actually in session.

Once again, I cannot wait until our next President appoints a textualist to the Supreme Court in the middle of the night and pretends that it's perfectly legal because Congress wasn't in session at the time.

The guy who did the hatchet job on Gen. McChrystle reports that Caesar Obama doesn't like photo-ops with the troops. I suspect the feeling is mutual.

The most conservative Congressman, Jim DeMint, recently said that Ron Paul's supporters are part of the GOP base and that we can't afford to alienate them.

I'm no expert, but my guess is Paul's supporters can be divided into three groups: constitutional federalists, libertarian hippies, and people who just like Ron Paul. Of the three, only the former can be expected to vote for anyone with an R next to their name who isn't Ron Paul or his son. Sorry, Senator, I disagree. You cannot attract the libertarians without alienating the social conservatives.

Romney and Paul are the only two Republican candidates on the ballot in Virginia. This will be an excellent way to see if my opinions expressed in the first section and the one just above this one are correct.

...one more

So now people - by which I mean conservative commentators and a pro-Gingrich PAC - are attacking Romney's record at Bain Capital.

Good.

It's good because Obama's going to do it incessantly, so the more practice Romney gets in now, the better he'll be at deflecting the attacks when Obama's hammering him. Also, the more it gets flogged now, the more bored we'll all be when Obama doesn't shut up about it.

Monday quickies

Now that I have an internship, two things:

1) things are happening. This means I have more stuff to talk about.

2) things are happening. This means I have less time to talk.

With that in mind, here are two thoughts on my mind before I crash for the night.

First, one of my co-workers today commented that Hugo Chavez looks like a Sontaran.

Second, the guy who "won" and had Congress in his pocket for his first two years as president is going to try to run against a do-nothing Congress. Seriously.

Political Round-up: 1st week of January

Welcome to the first in a weekly series of posts that will run right up through the first week in November.

1) Romney got ambushed by some OWS hipster in a post-Iowa "victory lap" rally. This comes about a month after he got ambushed by a gay soldier on the campaign trail. Screw Romneycare; this guy's biggest problem is that he seems to fall flat on his face in one-on-one interactions. This is all the more puzzling because he's a fantastic debater. (Incidentally, if Romney does lose the nomination, he could score a few points with the more conservative wing of the party by loaning the nominee his debate coach gratis. Even if the nominee is Gingrich.)

2) Rick Santorum came out of nowhere to be the latest Anti-Romney, so that he can then run as an Anti-Obama in the general blah blah blah.

2a) Rick Santorm got an endorsement (though they certainly didn't intend it that way) from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the group that recently suceeded in stifling free speech in America by pressuring a blogging service to shut down an anti-jihad blog. The organization branded Santorum as "islamophobic," which is as good as an endorsement as any.

Let me be blunt here: Captain Sweatervest does not have the organization in place to run a competent national campaign. He's going to burn out well before the convention. And, family values aside, he's pretty much the "same" big-government conservative as Romney.

The word "same" is in quotation marks there because I don't really buy the argument that Romney's a big-government conservative. I mean, I don't really think Romney's conservative. I think Romney's a federalist. By that I mean he believes (or at least appears to believe) in a small federal government and powerful state governments. I base this theory on the facts that he's trotted out federalism as part of his defense of RomneyCare and has infused his campaign pamphlet with federalist rhetoric. (There's no direct link to his pamphlet because I am not a member of his political campaign and I'd probably be violating some obscure and unconstitutional law by providing you with one.)

3) Obama claims he has "an obligation" to act without Congress. Can we start comparing him to Franklin "I have an obligation to act without the Supreme Court" Roosevelt again? How about Caesar?

So anyway, Caesar Obama can determine when Congress is and is not in session now, and can act on his own accord for the good of the people. Let's remember that when the next president uses recess appointments to fill the Supreme Court with originalists and textualists.

4) There are 1,231 waviers for ObamaCare. There are 1,231 politically-connected individuals or organizations out there that do not have to play by the same rules as the rest of us.

All hail Caesar.