Ladies and gentlemen, watching the results of the Republican Presidential primary contest the past few weeks has led me to conclude that our national sporting events are sadly outdated.  In particular, our National Pastime needs to be radically redefined.

We need to replace baseball with my new hybrid sport:

“Full-Contact Poker Foot Chess”

This will be a hybrid sport that synthesizes the best of full-contact Judo, the intrigue, bluffing and luck associated with a good game of Poker (large bets allowed), the careful strategy and intense action of an NFL game – with the cerebral analytics of Speed Chess.

To all you baseball fans, I’m sorry for not including you here but you will be allowed to wear your favorite team’s cap during certain phases of the game, either to psych out your adversaries or just to cover your bald spots.  And at the end, the losing team (if certain conditions are met) gets 1 chance to score an extra “significant quantum” of points by successfully shooting (only X ring hits count) a high-powered target rifle at a target more than 500 yards away, just to make it interesting.  This “special teams” effort will only be permitted if a successful attempt would send the game into overtime, and can only be used once per regular-season game, twice per game during the playoffs if double overtime is possible.

I’m going to need some help fleshing this out in terms of how we award points,  and the long and complicated way that games will be conducted and referreed, but I think this new sport really gets to the heart of what America’s election season is really all about.

My thinking is, this new sport has something for everyone:  it’s got the deep analytics of turn-based games like chess combined with the controlled violence necessary to keep people interested, and a lot of opportunity to structure the stages of the game and propose rule changes to really have some substantive debates and keep the rules “process people” happy.   We’d have to pick a team size based on the number of players in an NFL game, roughly, but in addition to their usual positions each player will have specialties that can be used during (and after) each down.  In a nod to motorsports, teams can choose players on their starting lineups each week through a 5-lap SCCA race, but that has to be done well before the game begins, in the parking lot of the stadium.  Players will, however, be allowed to wear sponsorship jerseys that reflect their favorite NASCAR teams.

I deliberately excluded motorsports from the “core” of the new sport because it lowers the barrier to entry, and it’s an optional feature.    I want to make sure almost every team can play this game all across the country.  You’ll need a few chess sets, a couple of decks of cards, some old football gear, some inexpensive Judo mats, some basic timers,  in other words, things people should be able to come up with all across the country without any large up-front cost.   Surplus equipment, really.  The high-powered rifle can be borrowed on an as-needed basis, you just need one, and almost every town in America has someone who has one.

What do you think?  Please submit your own ideas for America’s new national pastime, right here in this thread.

And take it seriously, but don’t take it all too seriously, if you know what I mean.

Because what we’ve got right now, folks, on the political side, is a truly unprecedented contest.  It’s unlike anything most of us recognize.  We’re in uncharted territory, and so let’s think Big.

Everyone is consumed with the Presidential horse race in this country and there are good reasons why they are.

But just for a second, I’d like to comment on a headline on Drudge today, which has ostensibly nothing to do with the race for U.S. President … except in terms of the foreign policy of our current administration.  It’s here at the Financial Times:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5dc3ce02-4059-11e1-9bce-00144feab49a.html

The “Egyptian Spring” that overthrew Hosni Mubarak was widely ballyhooed at the time as being the victory of a liberal Democratic movement ousting a murderous dictator.  It was the Egyptian Hippies Raging Against the Machine, ushering in a new age of liberalism and secular tolerance.  What actually happened was that the military took complete control of the country after the wealthy took off for parts elsewhere, and the subsequent elections (certified by Jimmy Carter) expressed the “will” of the remaining Egyptian people – mostly hardcore Islamists - to elect other, hardcore Islamists into positions of power across the entire country.  And that is what the country is right now.

Of course, the Egyptians in this country at the time told us that the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more extreme Islamist groups in Egypt were just disorganized fringe elements, nothing to be concerned about, and that the wellspring of liberal democracy was finally coming to replace a thug the United States had supported.  In fact they warned against the regime change in Egypt being “hijacked by Israel” in Chicago.

It now looks like absolutely none of that was true at all.  It was complete counterfactual propaganda.  It was all just a smokescreen.  What’s emerged is that the Islamists are in fact in power in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has 46% of the vote, the really ultra-radical Islamists are actually in power,  and now they’re seeking to extort/borrow money from the International Monetary Fund.  $3.2 billion dollars, according to the Financial Times.

In a recent article talking about why Obama should castle Biden with Hillary, Robert Reich alluded to the idea that somehow America’s foreign policy under Obama was a glistening triumph because of “results” like this.  It seems to me that we’ve got hardcore Islamists in power in Egypt who are now basically extorting the IMF for money.  What do you think of that triumph?  And couldn’t it be said that the professors who were talking in Chicago about the extent of influence of the hardcore Islamists in Egypt were simply lying at the time?

Here’s the link to Robert Reich’s reference to the “Hillary/Biden” Castling event.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/obama-clinton-2012_b_1173300.html

“Moreover, the economy won’t be in superb shape in the months leading up to Election Day. Indeed, if the European debt crisis grows worse and if China’s economy continues to slow, there’s a better than even chance we’ll be back in a recession. Clinton would help deflect attention from the bad economy and put it on foreign policy, where she and Obama have shined.”

They’ve “shined” apparently by helping the most radical Islamic regime in Egypt’s history to come to power.  Not a record really that I would be that proud of.

Very short, and not recommend worthy, maybe, but a thought tonight on the eve of the Iowa Caucuses, or Iowa Caucii as they’re being called here on Redstate tonight.  They’re certainly the most cockeyed caucii I’ve seen in a long time.

By Howard Cosell, with posthumous apologies to Howard Cosell.  I love you, Howard.  Please don’t strike me down.

It’s a heck of question to ask whether I know what’s going to happen here, people, as we go into the final rounds.  Because this is just the first round and we’ve got so many things happening now that practically the entire race ahead of us is still a murky road, a confounding collection of pits and twists and turns, and practically no practitioner of the persuasive preregotive would do anything other than to say they’re just basically stumped.  Dan McLaughlin is weighing in about Rick Santorum on the front page, Rick Santorum is seeing huge boosts from the 700 Club because of the 700 Club, and now Rupert Murdoch, and Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are locked in a dead heat in Iowa with our new contender, Santorum, who is the fourth man in a three man battle royale for the top seat in the first primary.

Then of course there’s Gingrich, that erstwhile supposed victim of a Romney-boat attack, formerly called a Wounded Wolverine by our Man of Courage Dan Rather, all driven out of himself by his own curious commentary.  All of it might mean something, but maybe not to anyone except the victors.  In the middle of a mild winter, we’ve got the serious Republican nominees locked in a dead heat here in the middle of the freezing cold, and we’re all looking for the leg warmers and good cigars.  Newt Gingrich is being a gentleman but showing that peculiar face of his, that sad square face of not knowingness, of complete befuddlement surrounded by utter confidence that appears there for some inscrutiable reason.

Romney’s people have been kicking him hard (and most of it is deserved, and reciprocally too) for a long time now.  I myself haven’t seen anything Romney’s landed below the belt.  They’re both this new kind of Republican fighting match champion flip flopper politico group led by focus groups and honed by consultantspeak.  The facetious face of our nation.  A serious group of well-monied behind the scenes figthers are there in each corner, something to chomp on and contend with, a world of pollsters and opinion seekers.  When you look to the corners you have to see those crowds of carefully selected consultants waiting to pounce like careful cats on anyone who comes across their corridor.  Santorum is, of course, a choice who deserves a voice and Rupert Murdoch is tweeting about that man’s rise in the final rounds, a stellar rebound, an incredible change of fortune right here on the cusp of the voting!  The very cusp!  Before the first punch is really thrown!  An amazing change of fortunes, but who knows who will benefit?!

We’ve got a long time ahead of us, folks and more contentious and momentous battles to come so this is just a foretaste of the Thrilla in Manila.  Rick Perry and his organization, my personal favorites, might be right at this point to hang back and not let themselves be drawn into the Republican melee.  Not at this particular time, in this pernicious place, Rick.  It’s very early.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you this is an Establishment fight – we’ve got a full street fight going on here, a real down and dirty contest of wills that makes the Establishment blanch when they think about the power of the fisticuffs being thrown back and forth.  In ordinary times the Establishment doesn’t like to get this dirty, and they’re not right now.  They want their hands off and far away from the brusing battles, they don’t want to get their sleeves dirty in this fight.  There are left hooks, there are jabs, we’ve got the Spiked Pipes(tm) and the mixed martial arts now, a kind of voodoo mixture of fighting that’s sure to bring the house down.  And the house will come down.   And they’ll be there afterward, clean and unsullied, to pick back up whatever is left of it.

As far as my predictions are concerned, please reference the title here because my prognostications (along with Howard Cosell’s) would be extremely careful and uncommitted.  I don’t know where this is going in the first round but all of our candidates are out there naked on the floor and they’re running around like modern gladiators, and we’re glad that some of them aren’t wearing clothes and most of them have no shields so it’s going to be a bloody next few rounds.

In the spirit of the strange and weird contest we find ourselves observing carefully with meticulous attention here through this blog, I invite our more careful and perspicacious observers to weigh in to the discussion but with one, primary and singular caveat:

You Must Do So In The Voice of Howard Cosell, as Best You Can

From here on out I want to hear frank contribution in only the best voices of One of the Most esteemed Sports Voices in the World.  I’m not frankly interested in listening to other peoples inane droning, I’m not worried about hearing academic discussions, I’d like to hear a raw and honest discussion, in the voice of Mr. Cosell, how we should be viewing the race as it exists right now, in all its magnitude, manifesting itself gloriously and also perhaps sadly, at this moment in front of us all.

My prediction is that there are punches that have yet to be thrown and certainly in this contest of wills many more rounds to fight.  So here we go, viewers:  channel Mr. Cosell and give us all tonight, if not your best, then your best guess as we wait until tomorrow where the first round will unfold right before us.  Here is your chance to outdo the odious, to overcome the obtuse, and to out-alliterate the alliterative and voice for yourselves, tonight Redstaters, before it’s all over, in Howard Cosell’s voice, how you think things are going to wind up.  Have at it generously and with complete confidence that nothing you say will be judged on anything other than artistic merit and sheer good sportsmanship, as it should be.

Howard Cosell must decide the first rounds of this contest if there is any God in heaven so please all you pugnacious prognosticators, shed your petty vanities and here, announce to us all on the podium your predictions.

[I made a couple of minor edits and fleshed it out a bit more.  The overall arc is the same.]

Here is where I go off the rails and tell people that I’ve finally decided on which candidate I like the best and tell them whom to vote for.

I’ve decided to endorse three of them, in this order:

1) Rick Perry, current Governor of Texas
2) Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts and…
3) Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives and general Idea Man About Town and Bon Vivant.

I’ve thought a long time about this recommendation and I hope you will too.  They’re in the order I prefer, and you’ll notice that I’m not and never have been a Redstate front-pager.  I understand why their order might be different than mine.   Redstate has a self-imposed duty to support unwavering pro-life candidates and people with impeccable Conservative records.  That’s their imprimatur as a blog and an adjuvant to Human Events and I understand the demands of their mandate.  But as a longstanding user here, someone who the Editors tolerate with various degrees of hilarity and/or disgust, I can differ from them time to time without suffering the Spiked Pipe(tm).  And therefore I will do so now:

Rick Perry is my #1 choice right now because I think he’s actually the least compromised and most truly bonafide Conservative candidate in the race.   He had a couple of missteps in the early debates but everything since then has been wonderful.  He is going to be the only candidate I donate money to in this election cycle.  I’m supporting him with cash.  Not much, but he’s the only candidate I’m supporting with cash.  Romney and Gingrich have enough already, and I want more than anything else to see Rick Perry make this a contest.

In the end I trust Rick Perry more than I do either Romney or Gingrich when it comes to the things I care about as a Republican/Conservative.

This is not fealty to Redstate:  I’ve liked Perry from the beginning and the only thing that upset me were his bobbles in the earlier debates.  He screwed up a little but it was no big deal to me.  After watching him debate several times now I still think where he’ll find his moment in is the one-on-one contest with the guy whose job he wants to take.  He wants to debate the One, not the Others, so to speak.

Among the last two candidates I think are viable, I pick Romney over Gingrich.  To some of you, knowing that I live in Massachusetts that’s not much of a surprise, but believe me – it’s a surprise to me.  I’ve had nothing but time to assess his tenure as governor here now that Deval Patrick is our governor, and my verdict is that I would take Romney back tomorrow if he wanted to be Governor again.  PLEASE.  Yes, Romneycare sucks in Massachusetts and I *still* pick him over Gingrich.  Why?  Because I really think he’s learned more than anyone else in the past five years.  People are going to look at me and throw shoes and say, “Kowalski, you schmuck, you’re just a starry eyed optimist” but I still think he’s a better and more stable candidate than Gingrich who can get things done against an *almost overwhelming* opposition.  I have no real *oomph* for Gingrich.  I’m sorry but I don’t.  I look back at his record and I read the people who won’t endorse him now, and they’re the people who knew him best.  You can hate on Ramesh Ponnuru but he’s no flake and if it came down to having someone on *my* side in a bad debate scenario, you’d better believe I’d want Ramesh in my corner.

So Romney is my fallback candidate of choice — and believe me — people can lick their wounds and learn to live with him as the President here on the Right.  He’ll be great with a legislature that holds his feet to the fire in particular.  He’ll also do a great job on the world stage for America, because he’s not going to trip over his words, he’s not going to make mincemeat out of the English language, he has a great looking family, and as far as those things are concerned I don’t have any doubt he’ll meet anyone in the world eye-to-eye with no problem.  And I don’t want to hear any more about people fired from Bain Capital:  that’s part of the job.  Romney is a careful and thoughtful man, and he’ll do *very* well with a legislature behind him that keeps his toes warm.  Romney lived with the most single-party state legislature in the country and did a pretty good job from the other party.  He didn’t waver on the 2nd Amendment even though there was a lot of pressure for him to do so.  The key thing about Romney is that, yes – it’s true to a certain extent: he does change his positions according to political calculations, but if we have a strong legislature behind him, that will do a lot of good.  Romney really wants this job and my educated guess is that he’s going to be a very accessible President to the people who were able to overcome their doubts and work productively with him.   He wants to be a success, and he knows America has to succeed for him to be a success if he wins.

I don’t know of anyone personally who can learn to live with Gingrich in Massachusetts, but I guess people think someone can, so I’ve had to reassess him.  The time goes back a long way.  I’ve had to discard a lot of things I thought I knew about him.  I apologize for my most memorable “memory” of him, which was planted there erroneously.  Who is he?  Who would he be?  He’d be a Philosopher-President with a hardcore Engineering sensibility, and I mean that in terms of real Engineering, not social Engineering.   Very gabby and talkative, at times in several different directions.  Sometimes captivatingly so, and he’s very far from clueless.  He’s someone who talks with people with his ideas, who tries to persuade them with the power of his ideas as a leader, occasionally making use of the Bully Pulpit to do so - and convincingly – a lot of the time.  He doesn’t mind conversations with people - he really *is* smart enough to make his case and think around most of the potential obstacles, most of the time.  I can really see Newt Gingrich using the Oval Office address effectively again (to a lesser extent Romney also).  In terms of other things — Is he a person who truly loves America?   Someone who wants to see America succeed?  A guy who knows how the sausage is made in Congress?  Someone who isn’t going to show up there wet behind the ears as the Executive?  Newt Gingrich is all those things, too.  **I** can definitely live with a guy like that as our President.  He’s always said that if the moment was there, he’d be ready for it.  So I’ll give him the chance, too.

All that has passed is past.  At some point the statute of limitations on mistakes has to be invoked.  Newt’s wives don’t bug me.  The fact that political cartoonists find him easy to caricature doesn’t influence my thinking by one iota.  Romney’s adventure with the Massachusetts Legislature doesn’t bother me.  Let us all look toward the future.  You go to war with the army you have, not always the army you want.

So there it is.  Hurl the substantive matters at me now so I can debate them with you, and I’ll do my best.  My hope and money is with Rick Perry, there’s $50 in that, my safety is with Romney, and my last best choice is Gingrich.  I can learn to live with him if you Gingrich guys can learn to live with Romney in that eventuality.

My sincere belief/suspicion is that Romney will be the nominee.  In that case I am going to be proven wrong on #1, passably right on #2, and right on #3, also.  As far as spending $50 on Rick Perry’s campaign, if I lose, I couldn’t lose the $50 supporting a better guy.  We’ll see what happens.

I will also say that I’ve tried to read as many thoughtful people’s accounts of these folks as our nominee as I could.  And the Washington Times was wrong:  it’s not like stuffing a cat into a trash can, it’s like trying to flush a cat down the toilet.

There are a whole list of people who I will not accept as President.  I’m not an elitist:  I don’t even have a car I can drive right now.  The elitists have their picks, I have mine and until I become an official member of the Elite (which I’m sure I’ll let everyone know when the transition occurs) those are my picks, in that order.

Out of all these three, my biggest doubt about Gingrich comes down to what I fear is a tendency on his part to 1) Micromanage and 2) Lose Interest.  I’m worried that he’s a quick study and that he won’t follow through.  That’s why he’s last on my list.

In the end, I want to impel everyone who reads this to think carefully, balance it all out, and vote for the person you really think is the overall best to lead our country during these weird and strange and dangerous times.  I think a vote for any of these three men wouldn’t be wasted.  Governance is a continuous process and life never stops moving.  We can work with these three people better than anyone else, none of them have two heads, and most of the one head each of them have is pretty damn good.  They are all my pick for President (but I do have a preference).  

I think after watching her performance in her newfound (apparently an epiphany after all the years of avoiding being contacted by the media) role, that it’s perfectly clear:

Chelsea Clinton is going to run for President in 2016 or 2020.

Yes, we’re off to a slow start, it’s a boring start, but Amanpour has already stepped down and now Chelsea Clinton gets out of the blocks (despite it not being her career choice at all) with a stable, bland as unbuttered toast debut.  There’s nothing there to criticize except the anticlimax of it all, which means that she made it.  She’s fixed in that spot now and is cemented as a talking head who has nowhere to go but UP.  She survived the first week by pumping out an overdose of mediocre blandness, and that’s what you want to build on when you’re Chelsea Clinton – bland, unbuttered toast that takes at least five or six years to build the following for…

See you in 2016 or 2020.  She’s gonna run!

She’s going to be the Eleanor Roosevelt of the next 30 years.  She’s starting off slow and boring but she’s going to modulate that gradually until “My Day” is HER day.

Some people read the commentary and criticism of her initial appearance and say she was too bland, too boring, etc., etc.  But you know that’s on purpose.  She doesn’t want to be as polarizing as her mother, so she’s going to be as bland as powdered milk until she gets some traction.  Pretty soon, Chelsea Clinton is going to be on EVERYTHING, everywhere.  It was a perfect debut for her, exactly what I expected – super low-key, almost incomprehensibly boring, almost like it didn’t happen.  That tells me she’s going to be around *forever*.

Human Events is running an ad here on this site that invites people to take a survey about Herman Cain’s candidacy.

Fine, as far as that goes, but why does the first question have to be complete nonsense and totally unanwserable the way it’s phrased?

Here’s the question:

Herman Cain has recently come under fire for sexual harrassment allegations that have surfaced from his days as president of the National Restaurant Association. Pundits have critizied the Cain campaign’s handling of the scandal, and are questioning whether he can maintain his newfound frontrunner status.

1. Can Herman Cain survive this scandal, or will the allegations destroy his campaign’s momentum? Vote now!

Yes
No

When you attempt to answer this question, you see that it is really two questions with only one answer allowed.  It’s extremely poorly phrased.  It’s a meaningless question.

You could answer “yes” or “no” and the value of your answer would be completely interpretative given the way the question is written.

A better way to write it, not the best way, but at least a logically answerable way would be:

“Choose between the two:  A: Herman Cain’s Campaign can survive this scandal.  B: The allegations will destroy his campaign’s momentum.
1) A
2) B”

Something tells me we can do better than this.

//

*This question is required

The markets fall several hundred points in a day.  Today the DJIA is down more than 3%.  Then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, they’ll rise.  Then they’ll fall precipitously as everyone swoons 500 points over the next phase of the Eurozone crisis.  Then they’ll rise again as better news emerges – for a day or two, as the news of a new deal in Europe is reported.  Then someone catches a cold, Berlusconi falls asleep at a meeting, and the markets fall again.  You get the idea.

It looks an awful lot like the Europeans are manipulating the stock market through the selective development of “good news” and “bad news.”

Next, Sarkozy is going to slip and fall on some ice in France and Merkel will catch the flu at the same exact moment and the markets will just stay eeeeeerily stable.

I don’t have enough money to trade in the equities markets right now but just watching this weird behavior reported breathlessly everywhere across the world every day, I have to think:

All this quasi-regular periodic convulsion seems like an ideal money pump.  You can make the markets rise on good news, you can make them fall on “bad” news, and each time you can calibrate the rise and fall of the markets fairly well.  They’ll rise and drop by several percent depending on what the news is.  Spurt up several hundred points (a few percent) on good news and it will just as reliably sell off when there is more “bad” news.  This has been going on for a long time now.

We see this weird sawtooth pattern in the Dow and it’s amazing how well it corresponds to the news coming out of Europe in one form or another, good or bad.

I think the Eurps are pumping the equities markets.  They seem to be having a crisis then a reconciliation then a reemergence of the crisis than a reconciliation then another reemergence of the crisis, and so on and so forth.  They’re broke!  They need money real bad.  Particularly the wealthiest members of their societies right now, because they’re all in deep doo-doo generally, so it’s better to have money when you announce the final austerity programs for everyone else.

How long can they keep that up?  What do you think?  Look at this sawtooth pattern in the past six months.

It seems to me that the Europeans know when the markets will go up and when they will fall because of the news they make, they’re just convulsing the markets up and down almost at their whim and according to the spirits of the angels in their medicine cabinets.  You only have to know they’ll rise and fall by a few percent to make a LOT of money – as long as you know in advance which direction the swing will go.

http://money.cnn.com/data/markets/dow/

I’ve been watching this whole Herman Cain/Rick Perry/Mitt Romney/Anonymous Donks fracas over the past few days on my cellphone and I have something to say finally.

First of all, I’ve been watching it on my cellphone (Samsung Galaxy S, Android over Verizon, nice phone, works great, cheap) because my power has been out since last Saturday.  It was finally restored 20 minutes ago and I can tell you that there’s nothing like electricity to make you happier after six days of crapping in plastic bags and heating noodle water up 6 ounces at a time and running extension cords all over the place while schlepping a generator hither and yon all week long trying to get at least *some* productive work done.  In the meantime everyone else has been bothering themselves silly with all this incredibly unproductive and even destructive work.

But I’ve been watching it over the past six days (well, it seems that long) and I have to tell you all:  none of you have anything serious to complain about.  You ain’t suffering.  Get your heads straightened out.  It’s pretty obvious to me that this is a hatchet job hit piece attempt at destroying Herman Cain and driving irreconcilable wedges into the Republicans and Conservatives in this election cycle.  The truth will come out and it should, but everyone needs to calm the heck down.  There’s nothing you all have gone through in the past six days that even remotely compares to balancing freezing the pipes and freezing to death at night with dying of carbon monoxide poisoning and knowing that you can’t shower and have to wake up tomorrow and go wipe your butt in the woods.

Now that the power is back on here I have a lot more to say about the whole Cain sex harassment thing but seriously folks if you can’t read between the lines here and realize what a truly enormous distraction this is, designed to make Republicans and Conservatives hate each other’s guts right when they need some solidarity, there’s nothing that can help you.  First it was Perry’s “Niggerhead Rock” and now it’s Cain’s blahblahblah alleged sex harassment woes.  It’s all really scary.  It’s designed to make you think it’s really scary.

It’s a bunch of crap in my opinion.  Watch this shiny object.

So get your heads on straight and be thankful you didn’t get 10 inches of snow the day before Halloween and had to spend the last week showering out of a tupperware container with ice cubes floating in it.  Then take a few deep breaths, calm down and quit banging away at each other long enough to realize that Rahm Emanuel is sitting back in his office in Chicago laughing his ballerina arse off.

Get on the backs of our candidates for good reasons, not the stupid reasons – and stop the circular firing party.  That is my advice after crapping in a plastic bag all week long.  Believe me, if I can do that, you can find the courage to keep your powder dry and not be led around by the nose into saying things and thinking things and wishing things you’ll regret.  Whatever the truth is, we can handle it, and it’s not that bad.

Over and out until tomorrow and yours very truly:  Me.

Ladies and gentlemen of Redstate, this is going to be my last post [scratch that, I have the feeling this is just getting started] on this debt ceiling/cap/balance subject.  I only have a few words to say and I hope that any lack of eloquence on my part doesn’t reflect negatively on the importance of the matter we have before us at this moment.

It’s time to support the Good Guys.

The Good Guys in this fight are the people who are pressing hard, and continue to press hard, against very long odds, for a Cut/Cap/Balance solution to the country’s fiscal woes.   They are the ones who are looking honestly at the exponential growth in our national debt, the completely heedless nature of which has become so otherworldly that it’s barely recognizable any longer.  We’re pushing up against the boundary of 100% of our GDP in debt, if we haven’t already gone over it, depending on whose estimates you listen to.

Earlier this afternoon the Washington Post had an article trying to draw a parallel between this situation and that of 1990, when the US Debt was barely 5% of its GDP, about $492 billion dollars and approximately $850 billion today.  The small errors in these numbers aren’t significant.  You can read their article here:

“Read their lips: For the origins of today’s deficit fight, look to 1990″

The author there is remembering the debt in 1990 at $492 billion dollars or $850 billion in “today’s dollars.”

Through a long and tortured series of inside-the-beltway reminiscences, he somehow manages to convince himself that the people who are calling for real limits on debts that are more than 1,500 percent higher than that  – right now – are the wrongheaded people.  Our debt currently stands at something like 15 trillion dollars.  It’s such an enormous amount of money that I really don’t think the entire rest of the world even understands it, and I don’t know whether we understand it ourselves.  We hear things like 150 billion Euros for Greece and don’t realize that’s about that’s only about $215 billion dollars.    That’s about 1/60th of our national debt.  If the latest Greek bailout is 1 minute of agonizing pain on a clock, our national debt is AN HOUR.  Does anyone in the world except the Chinese understand a Trillion Dollars?   The limits just keep rising out of sight – but our ability to pay those debts, as everyone knows in the past couple of years, is nowhere near as robust.  Go take a look at middle America.

What has happened since 1990 is that the situation has gotten between 15-20 times worse.  And all of that money, all of that debt that is owed, is on the backs of our children.  I’d say that’s a pretty damn good reason to be “intransigent” about it.

[Update:  Let's say our national debt is $15 trillion dollars.  That's a stack of dollar bills that would reach almost FOUR TIMES THE AVERAGE DISTANCE TO THE MOON.  If we had a way of piling it up, gluing it together and climbing it, we could climb all the way to the moon and back, TWICE on the pile of our national debt.]

I get scared too when the President of the United States, his Treasury Secretary, and half of the MSM, and Al Franken, get up and proclaim that without increasing that limit, we’re calling for a catastrophe.   Unstable people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz who base their existence on spending ever increasing sums of other people’s money and who are also utterly debased in their thinking try to stand up and throw stones.  It may be that we’ve reached a point of reckoning, but that’s hardly a catastrophe: it’s healthy that we call a halt to it.  It’s even more important that we realize people like Erick and the Club for Growth and Heritage are the people – probably the last of the honest people – who are sounding the alarm and calling on us all to do something about it.  Don’t be scared.  Be honest!

Please help me get behind their efforts and continue to support them.  This is going to be a difficult series of days.  Keep your cool, everyone, but do what I did three days ago:  shake it off and keep demanding what you know is right.  I had a bout of the “fear fever” but I came to my senses about it.

Our country deserves better.  It doesn’t deserve to be spent into oblivion by people who are so irresponsible they cannot even recognize more than an order of magnitude of difference in the scale of the problems we face.  And all of that more-than-an-order-of-magnitude difference has happened in just over 20 years, the time it takes for a generation to “grow up.”

What have we done?

I just have a simple question.

One of the things Geithner has done during the past couple of weeks while mentioning “coffers” is to insinuate that the United States Government can’t be “guaranteed” to have enough money to fund next month’s issuance of Social Security checks.

Does that money really exist there?  If not, where did that money go?

If Geithner and Obama’s threat not to pay the benefits is to be taken seriously, the first question everyone should be asking is:  “What happened to all that money?  I thought it would be there no matter what?”  Unless I’m reading these two guys wrong, they’re saying it just doesn’t even exist!

Just a short post:

We keep hearing about all these lemonade stands around the country being shut down by bureaucrats in municipalities because the kids haven’t obtained the requisite permitting.  It’s a shame, because running a lemonade stand in the summertime is something that children have traditionally done to introduce themselves to entrepreneurship and running a business – they’re being held back by the red tape.

I have an idea:  some enterprising person should establish Lemonade For America, LLC.   Its purpose would be to help youngsters in municipalities across the country obtain the permits they need to do business at a reduced cost.  To help them navigate the paperwork and fast-track their lemonade stand, it should take less than two weeks from application to approval.  LFA doesn’t make the lemonade and it doesn’t distribute the lemonade, but it works as a kind of clearing house that gets everyone’s documentation straight and works with local governments to lower the barrier to entry for these most local of all local businesses.

Let’s say, for example, that for a $25 fee, Lemonade for America would contact your local government and help you obtain the required permit, or a special permit that is strictly for these kinds of lemonade stands.  Local governments would still make money, the kids could still have their lemonade stands without running afoul of anything, and with enough buy-in across the country it would be a bonafide way for young entrepreneurs to break into the summer lemonade stand business without worrying about being shut down by rule-bound municipalities. 

I see the biggest problem in being drawing up the legal documentation and getting local municipalities to participate in the Lemonade for America initiative.  But if just a few hundred local governments accepted the framework, it could be legitimized and let the kids run their lemonade stands in the summertime without fear of being slapped with a fine or shut down.  

In my vision of it, Lemonade for America would be a nonprofit corporation that just sets a few clear standards and works with local governments to get special licenses for lemonade stands approved.   The focus would be on a very, very low up-front fee and enough expert advice and municipal participation to make it painless for your local entrepreneurs to get started with minimal cost, but still satisfy the regulatory requirements of townships and boroughs across the country. 

I see the application process being something simple that parents can be involved with their children in doing – one page, a notarized signature from a parent or guardian on the agreement, and a stamp from the local jurisdiction.  Follow that up with a Lemonade for America Facebook page, a Lemonade for America Newsletter, and some annual meetups.  Simple and low cost and in good faith from end to end - easy and inexpensive to do, and it clears away the patchwork jumble of red tape across the county and gets the kids doing what they want to do – run a bonafide microbusiness that they won’t have to worry will get shut down because of abstruse over-regulation.

Then we could get these sad stories of kids having lemonade stands shut down by the cops in the middle of the summer out of the news and make them a thing of the past.

“Lemonade for America – The Kids Make the Lemonade, We Make It Easy.”

The kids keep the profits from their venture.  They buy the lemons, they set the prices, etc.  All LFA does is help them get through the red tape.

What do you think?

For most people in the United States, the past three years have been the toughest of their lives for a couple of generations.  There are a few people who remember the Carter years, when neighbors in suburbs across America were siphoning gasoline from each other’s tanks in the middle of the night in order to avoid the gas-rationing lines in the morning and still get to work.  If anything, this situation today is more dire and even more challenging.  I’d like to offer my thoughts – based on hard-learned experience – so that people here at Redstate can understand how to cope with another year, living in the Obama Economy.

LEARN TO EAT DIRT

It’s all around you when you walk outside and it’s even underneath the sidewalks in most of our major cities and townships.  Fortunately, for most of us there isn’t any need to pry up large sidewalk tablets to get at the rich, life-sustaining loam underneath.  For most people in America, dirt is available almost everywhere with a variety of rich mineral compositions depending on where you buy it or scoop it from.  Oftentimes, construction companies who are presently out of work will have the best dirt still encrusted on the teeth of their large, industrial digging equipment.  You can sneak up in the dead of night, break it off by the pound and literally walk home with it and eat it – and nobody will ever say anything.  Think about setting up a dirt co-op in your local neighborhood:  the idea is to pool the best varieties of edible dirt from as many places as possible and present it so that it appeals.  If you have a gallon or two of runoff water or cat piss, you can pour that on top of the dirt to make it even more delicious.

FIND A NEW JOB

If you don’t already work for the government, I know – it’s sad, and your job prospects just suck.  Your chances of finding a new job at almost any age are really terrible right now.  You practically have to wait until someone dies or drives their car off a cliff before an opportunity even opens up, and then there are another 800 people who have already submitted their credentials ahead of yours.  It’s almost as much trouble as getting a job as a Ph.D. in Computer Science was back in the late 1990s.   But don’t let that deter you:  this is no time to lose hope!  Smart people can always come up with new and novel answers in difficult circumstances.  For example, many people have found they can’t pay their rent, and they’re getting thrown out of their residences.  Keep an eye out for them, because there are lots of them nowadays and this is your opportunity!  This is your time to step up, because they’re going to have a lot of things they’re just going to have to throw away and be hauled off by waste management corporations.  Do not neglect this trove of potentially new products to sell.  A little dumpster diving in a few days can easily net you a few hundred cast-off pieces of stuff that can be repackaged using some old food wrap and sold again as new.  With a little ingenuity, you’re not a dumpster-diver, you’re a Product Consultant!   Moreover, a lot of the things that people throw away can be successfully sent back to the companies that manufactured them as “defects” – and you can receive a whole new product to sell in the mail. 

CONSIDER A NEW LINE OF WORK

Most people in America have spent their adolescent and adult lives aspiring to achieve some form of excellence in a chosen field.  In a lot of cases, they’ve spent a lot of money in an attempt to accumulate the credentials and work experience they’d need to continue to advance their careers.  All of that is out the window right now.  Not only are they saddled with debt from the futile attempt to break into an already crowded field, at this point so many of those fields are folding up that what was previously fertile soil for their hopes and imaginations are just piles of sand stretching to the parched horizon as far as the eye can see.   That’s compounded by the fact that let’s face it, America has what so many economists and talking heads are calling a “structural unemployment problem.”  That means that no matter what field you want to go into, there won’t be any new jobs in it.  This is the time to consider a new line of work.   For example, if you had thought it was time to be an industrial engineer, this might just be the time to start digging ditches.   If you wanted to be an architect and use your talents manipulating space and materials in order to create new and innovative living environments, I’d cut that out right now and consider understanding the mechanics of switchblade knives instead.  Doctors and Lawyers who have graduated in the past three years will have to cut back on their expectations for the future:  instead of working in an esteemed hospital or clinic or high-salary partnership, it might be best to consider things like Street Medicine and Street Law.  Highly skilled astronaut candidates and nuclear engineers should start thinking about doing new things like painting in Trompe L’Oeil  and hanging out at the local pharmacy, packing bags.

LEARN SKILLS THAT MATTER 

For almost 100 years the Boy Scouts of America and the US Army have published manuals that can teach you how to tie knots, fell trees, cook food, boil water, find directions using the nighttime sky, erect basic survival structures and learn to live off the land.  It turns out that all that old wisdom has become new again – and you will need to use it.  Forget about bartering for your intellectual credentials in a developed and highly variegated workplace of skillsets – you’re going to need to understand how to start a fire with a few pieces of wood and a flint.  Before time runs out, learn how to protect yourself from the basics of airborne and waterborne diseases.   Learning how to kill and dress an animal isn’t something you should shy away from:  Even Dutch Restaurant in New York offers a Rabbit Pot Pie as one of their “comfort” dishes – you’ll just need to learn how to prepare it for yourself, which is suprisingly easy.

LEARN TO LAUGH

Listen, for 50 years America has had nothing but people telling themselves that everything was going to keep getting better, forever.  Regardless of which party you belonged to, the mainstay of American philosophy for the last century has been that tomorrow, everything would be better than today.  We’re finding out that it isn’t so.  It’s true for a handful of people given the way our government works, but for most of us it is not true any longer.  So all of it was, in a sense, a dirty joke.  That’s OK, you just need to learn to LAUGH!  When America has spent itself into oblivion and the rest of the world’s investors take off for other parts of the world, everyone is going to know just how bad a joke it was, but the most important thing you’ll need to keep your sanity is to keep laughing, even at all the bad jokes. 

MORE TO COME TOMORROW….

A lot of Senators are in China today.  They include Harry reid, Dick Durbin, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Frank Lautenberg, Jeff Merkley, Michael Bennet, Richard Shelby, Mike Enzi and Johnny Isakson.

Nobody knows what they’re doing over there.

This afternoon, however, half-page ads have been running on the Washington Post’s website about Chinese workers allegedly exposed to n-Hexane at Apple iPad manufacturing plants there.  They are essentially demanding greater worker’s compensation for their injuries.  Clicking the link takes you to a Washington Post blog on China.

http://chinawatch.washingtonpost.com/2011/03/harsh-reality-behind-apple-scandal.php

My guess is that a great deal of what the Senators are talking about in China, described above as “the world’s factory” is the extension of the right to sue American companies and extract worker compensation claims against them for products sold in America.  China is going to be dictating to the United States the terms under which it manufactures our goods for us.  It only makes sense.  They own us!

Tonight there’s a new WSJ poll splashing all over the Drudge Report talking about how Donald Trump is second only to Mitt Romney in popularity among Republican primary voters.  A couple of days ago, The Donald was reported to be doing very well in New Hampshire, also. 

I’m not surprised Mitt Romney is the front runner right now.  I knew that he would be.  Large segments of Americans don’t want another George W. Bush traditional Republican.  You can beat your head against a wall about that for a long time to come, but that’s what my people say.  And my guess is that he’s going to be the Republican nominee in the end.  What’s more surprising, though, is that Donald Trump is gaining so much ground, so quickly.

How can this be?  I myself am surprised at that, a little, so I’ve tried to think of an answer as to why?

While everyone’s heads are also spinning trying to answer that question, I can give a few guideposts:  the fact is that Donald Trump is doing a better job when he’s in front of the camera articulating a message against Barack Obama’s second term in office.  He doesn’t pull punches, and he just speaks very plainly.  He’s doing an especially good job telling Americans what they want to hear about China, and in terms of the economy he’s pumping out red meat through a firehose.  I expect that firehose to turn into a whole Company pretty soon. 

But here’s the big lesson, and this is why Trump is rising:  In terms of our recent national politics, he’s someone everyone knows but is also a completely fresh face, and when he did reveal himself as a Republican it attracted DROVES of attention.   He’s a chimeric figure.  He is the middle ground between Barack Obama (who nobody knew) and John McCain (who everybody knew).  America also doesn’t want a traditional Republican Conservative and it also doesn’t want another Obama.  Donald Trump has gauged the national mood precisely.  Obama looks more and more like a train wreck every day, he’s obviously beholden and ineffective, and Americans are looking for something…comfortably radical.

Like a casino.  And if anyone really examines it, what is a casino?  It is the most controlled environment on Earth that human beings willingly subject themselves while thinking they are “leaving things to chance.”  Casinos are zoos for human beings like no other in the world.  Everything is monitored.  The outcome of the games in terms of odds are rigorously predetermined and regulated.   Not a single person walks in or out of one without being seen by security cameras.  And yet people go to them believing … they’re having FUN!  Donald Trump knows the backstory of human zoos very well.   He is especially well-suited to make people feel like they’re taking a new chance.

I have a very strange feeling that Donald Trump is a lot closer to what a lot of Republicans want than they’re willing to admit:  he’s a guy who runs casinos, and he’s made his entire fortune off of games of chance (all of which are bound by strict mathematical rules in favor of the House).  He’s also not a busybody in terms of mores:  nobody who rents a room at a casino hotel wants anyone to think about what they do while they’re there.  And he’s an international businessman:  just keeping that empire alive and growing ensures that he sees what the real costs are to building or doing anything in America. 

Finally, he’s a lot more popular, like it or not, among a large segment of the younger generation than Tim Pawlenty ever will be.  The only moralism Trump has is the Bottom Line.  He’s not interested in what anyone really does to get there.  It’s a line that’s very much in tune with a lot of young people you meet at casinos throughout America. 

He can win, in fact he very well might win.  I’m putting odds on a Donald Trump Presidency right now at 2/3rds against.  He’s got a very good chance to pull it off.

The only real question I have is not whether Donald Trump is doing this for reasons he thinks will be beneficial to him, because he undoubtedly is.  This publicity is good for him whether he’s going to go all the way through with his candidacy or not.  The question is:  if he did win the Presidency, why would he want it?  He’s going to have to completely repurpose himself for 4 years or more.  He won’t be the master of his own destiny:  he’ll be the servant of circumstance.  That’s the ONLY reason I don’t think his candidacy is serious in the end.

My reading of the Zeitgeist right now is that the winning cohort of the American electorate wants the Librorepulitarian Demopublic.  It wants us to fight back against our enemies but not if it’s too costly.  It dislikes big government and high taxes but it doesn’t want to see its sister Susie get fired from her State job.  It loves all those promised benefits and hates the big Corrupt Fed and the International Bankers, but is anguised about how to pay for them on the one hand or apply for a loan without them on the other.  And right now the only thing that is cutting through the clutter is Donald Trump’s bluster.  It’s hitting the high notes, he’s crackin’ skulls.  The American electorate doesn’t know what it wants.  It’s all up for grabs.

This one is just to make you laugh a little. Kinda like a dirty joke. It’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, so laugh, OK?

I don’t normally re-report Politico stories, but this one is really funny. It seems that The People of Chicagoland have decided who is going to be the next mayor. The race is over. The three or four dozen (ok, maybe hundred) people who matter in Chicagoland, that is. The rest of them are going to vote, eventually, but that’s just a formality at this point.

Politico reports that filings released on Thursday indicate Rahm Emanuel’s campaign has amassed $11.7 million in funds from Hollywood big shots, former Treasury secretaries, celebrities, CEOs, etc., which puts him 508% ahead of the second best-funded candidate (Gery Chico) and an astonishing 1460% ahead of the next most popular candidate (Carol Moseley-Braun), according to their article. Even if those two were to fuse themselves together into some kind of hideous Chicago political monster, Emanuel would still have ‘em jackslapped to the tune of about 375%. That’s a big lead, brother.

The Chicago Mercantile exchange cut a check for $200,000, dozens of lawyers from top city law firms, especially Kirkland and Ellis, also gave in the thousands. Local real estate and finance moguls gave $50,000 donations by the handfuls.

So that means he’s gonna lose now, right?

[UPDATE:  As of late yesterday afternoon, the Governor of Hawaii is saying in an interview that he's FOUND IT!  Eureka! Hallelujah! We can all rest easy now, I guess, secure in the knowledge that Barack Hussein Obama is actually, legally and constitutionally, eligible to be the POTUS. 

The Governor is going to "do what we can..." whatever that means.

"It actually exists in the archives, written down," he said.  ... ""We'll do what we can as quickly as we can to make it inevitable that only those who wish the President ill, only the ones with a political agenda, will be the ones doing this kind of thing,"

What does "this kind of thing...." mean?  If he means playing hide-and-seek with the public, I would say that the blame for "this kind of thing" rests squarely on the people in charge of Vital Records in Hawaii.  I, of course, can take no credit for the Governor's new-found ability to search the vital records of his own state to produce and verify the birth records of the child of a personal acquaintance/friend who is now a pretty important person.]

At the beginning of this whole question, I tried hard not to be a ‘birther’.  I don’t know whether I am a ‘birther’ now, but the longer time goes on, and the weirder the prevarications become, the more questions I have about our President’s long-form statement of live birth here in the United States.

The more time that passes, the stranger and more politically intrigued the question becomes.  It should be a simple question that anyone could have resolved in an instant, with reference to a bonafide document, but the more time passes, the more convoluted the story becomes.  And that makes think a couple of things:

1) There is a real long-form statement of Live Birth for Barack Hussein Obama somewhere in Hawaii and nobody has found it yet, despite the Governor of Hawaii’s attempts to search for it.

In #1, what I would do as the President is wait as long as possible to show it, to maximize the impact on the Birther movement.  Keep it building, keep denying it’s a problem so that the voices grow more and more fervent and then !WHAM! hit them with the evidence, knocking all the wind out of their sails.

2) The long-form birth certificate from Hawaii doesn’t exist, but eventually some fascimile of it will be trotted out before the 2012 elections to accomplish much of the same thing as in #1, but with another fraud tacked on top of it.

3) There *is no* long-form birth certificate from Hawaii and no fraudulent document can be produced that will convince anyone.  In which case the President is in really big trouble, Constitutionally speaking.

I just don’t know.  I keep wondering about why the President and anyone else might want to play around with something so simple, so basic, and so seemingly simple to solve and/or refute, but all I see are media manipulations, and those manipulations have actually started me wondering whether there’s something to this idea that Barack Hussein Obama’s live birth certificate in Hawaii really just doesn’t exist. 

If the Governor of Hawaii was telling the truth, he could have produced it two weeks ago, but apparently he’s still searching for it.  Why?  I can’t think of any reason except that he really can’t find it, or he is waiting for the moment of maximum impact to reveal it.

The thing that gets me about it is that I know there are people in this country who could very credibly validate the birth certificate in a responsible and scientific forensic fashion if one were shown to them.  We have experts on every kind of printed document that has ever been produced by humankind here in this country.  If a certificate was produced, and if it was real, it shouldn’t be a problem to verify its authenticity through a number of forensic means.  I would imagine such a task would be duck soup to a real art historian, for example, someone who works with old texts and works of art.  Someone at the Smithsonian surely has the expertise to validate that document, if it exists.  Lay the question to rest and let’s stop the enormous waste of people time and energy on the speculation.  That to me would seem to be something the President would be interested in doing here at this point in America - to positively stop people from wasting any more valuable time on absoultely frivolous things. 

I can’t make a poll here at Redstate, so I’ll just put the options here and let people put their votes in the comments:

“WHEN WILL BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA’S LONG FORM HAWAIIAN CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH BE SHOWN?”

1) At the precise moment Barack Hussein Obama decides it will do the most damage to people asking the question, and not before.

2) Whenever anyone finds it in Hawaii.

3) Sometime after Obama is no longer the President after losing the election because of it.

4) Never, because it doesn’t matter to anyone, even if the whole thing is a put-up job.

I keep looking at what’s happening in Camden, NJ and I just can’t believe what I’m seeing there.  Or maybe I do believe it and I knew it was coming, but I can’t believe it was allowed to reach this point.

For those of you who haven’t been following the apocalyptic tale of Camden, you can find a lot of the reports on Drudge.  They just laid off something like half the police force and firefighters there, in a town run by criminals, and the actual totals almost don’t matter.  Half of the city lives below the poverty line, all the manufacturing jobs that used to form the pillars of what Camden was have left for parts South and East, or at least elsewhere, and the violent crime rate is already 5 times the national average.  Before the layoffs.

You’re seriously talking about a place in America – right on the East Coast – where the illegal immigrants currently in the city should be thinking hard about going back to Juarez voluntarily (nobody is going to kick them out, not in Camden) — because it’s safer and the jobs and life expectancy are better there.

It’s fair to say that Camden is a city being lived in by people who cannot afford to leave, lorded over by thugs running drugs, with a political class that is clinging to life by the thinnest of reeds.  It’s a city that was kept on life support by the taxpayers of New Jersey for many years, while everything worthwhile about living there got up and was lost hell and gone.  And now the money has run out – all of New Jersey’s money has run out (the casinos there have sucked wind for the past 3 years) and Camden is facing an implosion and it could be a very violent implosion.

I look at Camden and I don’t see an outlying phenomenon, though.  I see it as becoming much more mainstream for a lot of places in America.  Where would the people in Camden go if it wasn’t for Camden?  Some of them might like to leave, but how?  What will they build there?  Another casino?  What jobs will they get to finance their exodus?  What surrounding town is willing to absorb the blight of Camden and take on the burdens of a failed city within what until recently was called one of the most prosperous states in America?

We’ve got the rot eating away at us right in the middle of some of the most prosperous areas in our country, and nobody seems to know what to do about it.  Our best answers so far seem to be to try and find jobs in casinos (which is what they mean by “hospitality”) or health care.  So…we’re going to be working to lose money to the State or try to maintain people in increasingly poor health, at greater and greater expense.

These things don’t sound to me like a recipe for a society that can rebound from the bust of the housing market bubble.  I really don’t think there’s anything in America left to replace that last one:  you were talking about a massive failure of the market in the realest of the real property – people’s homes.  Everyone who knows seems to say that we won’t see significant unemployment declines for something like 5 years or more, if ever.  How can a city like Camden ever rebound if that’s true?  How can America?  What will happen to all the people there?

Everyone is watching Camden right now in a kind of morbid fascination about how far and quickly the cancer will spread, how many other cities around the country will go the same way, and what the aftermath of it will be, like some kind of necromantic curiosity.    But there are real people there.  Some of them are still alive.  Many of them were victims of circumstance and are good people.  What will happen if the rest of the country goes this way?

Listen, we don’t want any unstable perons influencing millions of people at a time in America.  Because they might be dangerous, to themselves or others.

We don’t seem to have any problems with Oprah Winfrey, though, who admits she ate 30 pounds of macaroni and cheese after having been trounced by “Bride of Chucky” in its opening weekend.

“I ate about 30 lbs. worth,” she tells Morgan. “I’m not kidding, I’m not kidding.”  Wow, that’s a lot of mac and cheese.  Was it Kraft, at least?

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/2011/01/13/2011-01-13_oprah_winfrey_beloved_box_office_failure_made_me_eat_30_pounds_of_mac_and_cheese.html#ixzz1BFKB56At

Winfrey herself is now competing with former jailbird Martha Stewart for cable television viewers, and the last I heard, Oprah is slimming down again to get back into the fight against the Hallmark Channel.  The main reason is that Martha doesn’t mind bringing every gay dude in the nation who knows how to make silk flowers and toasted desserts (like women used to do) on to her program.  It’s a big question whether or not Winfrey will be able to shed her pounds and bring those boys onto her network without real trouble from Steadman.

Winfrey is one of the most influential people in the Universe and let’s face it folks, all she has to do is shed a skin cell with your name on it and you’re doomed.  Forever!  She’s the Chocolate Bulldozer!

But listen:  recently she’s decided that American television is a Vast Wasteland.  This, after having done more to create it than any other single human being on the face of the earth in the past quarter century.

[And I'm just getting started. This is just a little foretaste of what I would tell my Children about what America really IS these days. It's a horrible, dying, fetid, nasty place, full of people who have no common purpose and who actively hate each other. It's a dead Republic.]

Looking back at the past year and the two years before that, this New Year’s I wanted to think what I would tell my children (if I had any) about the Real state of the country they live in, and have to try to grow up in and thrive in. Barack Obama is rumored to be hosting a gala in the halls of Congress called the “State of the Union” message, and I’d just like to preempt him by telling ordinary Americans what things are really like here in America now that he has been the President for two years.

It’s a depressing story, and it’s getting worse, as I’m sure he knows. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Most of the Republicans we’ve just elected to Congress will not do anything substantive to stop the slide once their constitutents really weigh in. John Boehner will keep crying, as he did again today.

If I had a chance to tell my children something, the only thing worth conveying to them would be this: “America cannot stop spending money at the Federal, State and Local levels. All of the people who weren’t courageous enough to be real burnouts during the 1960s are currently running those governments, and they are atoning for their lack of courage, they think, by spending the country into the ground in the name of Social Justice. There is no hope for you and your children, it’s a generational thing. America is finished.”

I would tell them that there is no way they will ever earn enough to pay the tax burden that is going to be slapped on them in a few years time, regardless of what business they’re in, unless it is pure drug dealing. That’s right: the people who are going to be in a position to lead this country in 20 years are the drug dealers, corporate and noncorporate. It’s going to be a collection of drug dealers, pornographers, casino operators and tax collectors running the country by 2020, not engineers and scientists, not laborers and machinists, not doctors and lawyers: it’s going to be the thugs running the place. And people like John Kerry will get along with those thugs, because having a nation that has been converted into a Banana Republic is easy to deal with. He decries “cheap seats” politics but he really enjoys it better than anyone else in Congress.

I will tell my children: “I lived through the time of the greatest expansion of electronic technology in the history of human beings. And it was a waste of time. All of the effect of giving people cheap access to technology was designed so that corporations will know what they like, right down to what kinds of sheets they enjoy sleeping on in their beds. And all of the rest of it is a huge time sink. What started off as a way to increase people’s productivity turned out to be a gigantic mutual-masturbation exercise. But because it was the only thing anyone could rely on to keep growing the economy, it was encouraged. It’s useless. Cut the legs off that rabbit for me, please. That’s all America makes now is noise. And nobody listens to it.”

I’ll tell them: “Back when this country was founded, there was almost nobody here except a few rich people and a few poor people, but they were all in the same boat against the Indians and the British. Their ability to crush the savages and expand the country required they rely on each other and a few Frenchmen. Now we’ve grown to the limits of our domain and there are no savages to crush, nothing legal to exploit, the British and the French are whupped, and we have and a ruling caste of people who would prevent us from doing so even if we wanted to, which we do. Let’s make no bones about it: we want to crush and exploit. But we’re being prevented from doing so. China is not, and neither is India. If you really look carefully, you’ll see that the big people in Britain who still want to crush and exploit are all the ones who have homes in Dubai and invest in China and India. They really don’t want to live in Britain, because it takes all their money and makes them suffer through the endless guilt trip, which is why most of them are drunks.”

“Speaking of drunks, there is the whole problem of the Irish. They were doing pretty well up until recently, and then they found out how badly American bankers and investment firms had lied to them. Now they’re all drunks again. That is supposed to be seen in America as some kind of relief.”

“The President’s home state is the most bankrupt of any state in this country. For more than a decade it has listened to people pull the financial strings who shouldn’t have been allowed to piss on the front porch, but they did it. And they’re not dumb people! There is the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, all kinds of brainpower there, but lo and behold — they’re all flat broke and they’ve all screwed themselves! Now what they want to do is build more gambling parlors (always a source of reliable growth and estimable civic mores) and raise taxes and borrow more money to cover the enormous hole they’ve dug. Please, don’t read this, Children. It will tell you exactly what is going to happen to you. You just will not be able to stop.”

This is a short diary but it’s on an important subject and there really isn’t much more to be said than this:

Someone needs to tell John Boehner to grow the heck up and stop crying in front of every camera thrust in front of him, particularly when he’s being interviewed by Lesley Stahl for 60 Minutes. It was OK to see a sniffle here and there in the past, but this is now becoming a pattern in which Boehner just lets loose with the waterworks every time he’s asked to make a comment on something even tangentially emotional.

It’s becoming disturbing.

I don’t have any doubt that he’s a man of deep feelings but it’s getting worse and more acute and more frequent; his inability to keep a lid on it in public is really making me question his emotional stability. Lots of people have deep feelings and it’s a challenge for a lot of people to maintain their composure but they do it – and if they can’t, they find out why and they take steps to bring it under control. Boehner is now coming across as a blubbering, tongue-tied basket case whenever he has to think about something difficult or emotionally challenging. If he keeps crying every time someone asks him a tough question, it might be wise for the Republican caucus to relieve him of his duties and get him some help, because he’s obviously decompensating on a pretty regular basis these days.

America’s in a tough way, Mr. Speaker, and there’s a lot of pain to go around, but we’re not all sitting here with tissues crying all over each other: we’re working to make it better. So pull it together, bro.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2010/12/13/VI2010121301704.html?hpid=artslot