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Watching the primaries, I've heard a lot of people invoke Ronald Reagan's "11th Commandment": thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.
I wonder if Reagan said that before or after he tried to unseat President Ford in 1976.
So, California Governor Arnold Whatever decides to endorse John McCain today? Yeah, and last year he became a Red Sox fan once they had a 3-0 lead in the World Series.
Dude, pick your horse, ride it, see where it takes you. If it breaks a leg or you get thrown, you can always pick another. But spare us this bandwagon stuff.
Footnote: I'm going to be a little superficial for a bit, but I can't help myself. John McCain, assuming he becomes the GOP nominee, may be our country's most physically awkward major party presidential candidate since Richard Nixon. McCain has a combover. When relaxed, his left eye tends to drift a bit off center, like the guy from Men at Work. His smile is too big and looks uncomfortable. One side of his face is permanently enlarged due to skin cancer. Because of his POW injuries, he can't raise his arms above shoulder level. He has considerable stiffness in his upper body as well. When he insists on doing the "two thumbs up" thing, which no politician should ever do in the first place, it looks awkward and painful. It probably IS awkward and painful, because of all of those war wounds. Same with the strolling, town hall-style presentation. McCain is just too physically rigid in his upper body to seem natural.
See what I'm saying? You want a nominee you can feel comfortable with, aesthetically speaking. They don't have to look like a movie star and move with feline grace...I mean, really, Mike Huckabee would be perfectly acceptable in terms of looks and movement. McCain, though -- well, he's going to take some getting used to.
Anklenote: Cindy McCain, on the other hand...
One of the things I do to keep food on the table is monitor the activities of the Arizona state legislature. This includes having at least a cursory look at every piece of legislation that's introduced in every new legislative session.
A couple of bills have caught my eye during the current session.
First, HB2545 calls for the creation of a "strangulation and suffocation study committee." Now, I know it's possible for legislators to walk and chew gum at the same time...but come on, is this really where we want them devoting their energy? I guess, though, it's the next logical step for the Special Ad Hoc Committee on Noogies, Swirlies, and Indian Burns.
Second, HB2539 makes it a crime to "knowingly or intentionally trip an equine for entertainment or sport." What's an "equine," you ask? (You ask because you've only seen "equine" used as an adjective, never a noun.) An equine, according to the bill, "means a horse, pony, mule, donkey, or hinny." What's a "hinny," you ask? Well, "hinny" is not defined in the bill. You have to look that up separately. Apparently, a hinny is a hybrid between a stallion and a female donkey. Isn't that a mule, you ask? No, a mule is the offspring between a mare and a male donkey.
Yeah, forget obesity, illiteracy, climate change, smog, traffic, teenage pregnancy, and our undersized university system -- we need to get our arms around this horse-tripping epidemic.
Footnote: there are some other things to notice about the bill. First, note that you only get in trouble for "knowingly" or "intentionally" tripping an equine. Think about it, though. I'm pretty sure the following sentence has never been uttered in the entire course of human history: "It's the damnedest thing...apparently I tripped a horse back there, and I didn't even know it." Same with this one: "Yeah, I tripped a donkey, but I didn't mean to." Second, again, note that you only get in trouble if you trip an equine "for entertainment or sport." That brings to mind this scenario: "Yes, officer, I did trip a mule last October, but it served an important public purpose." Finally, where was the zebra lobby when this bill was put together? Asleep at the switch, I guess.
Anklenote: apparently this is a popular thing to do in
Mexican rodeos. I did not know that before I started making fun of this
bill. Then I was upbraided for being so callous.
...'cuz Mike D'Antoni played his entire bench.
Footnote: judges deemed Button's salchow "good but not great." Cruel. I guess they don't call it "hell" for nothin'.
Anklenote: Dick Button's not actually dead. He's just the only really old figure skater I could think of. In fact, I can only come up with two other male figure skater names of any sort: Scott Hamilton and Brian Boitano.
I'm speaking, of course, of the guy who came up with Rudy Giuliani's primary strategy: start with a big national lead and big leads in many individual states; sit out the first month's worth of state contests; see national and state leads evaporate as other candidates win early contests; go back to New York and hope to God that a Democrat wins the presidency so you can run again in 2012.
It's easy to say all of this in hindsight. In fact, I've always had a lot of respect for innovators. And if Giuliani does somehow win Florida and then goes on to win big on Super Tuesday, we'll talk about how his campaign has showed us another path to the nomination, one that we wouldn't have thought possible before.
At the same time, Charlie Black pointed out somewhere or other that no one has ever won their party's nomination (in the post-1968 era) without winning an election in the first month. If you were going to try to buck that trend, you'd have to have a pretty damn good reason for believing you could. Did Giuliani have that?
Footnote: of course, not knowing the ins and outs of the campaign, it's possible that I'm missing something big. And the big thing I may be missing is that Giuliani was way short on funds. Maybe he initially hoped and planned to compete in Iowa, and/or New Hampshire, and/or Michigan, and/or South Carolina, but ended up having to pick his spots. The lesser-known candidates had no choice but to compete early and try to ride a wave of momentum to victory elsewhere. But if you're the guy with the highest name recognition and a lead in the national polls going into Iowa, you may figure, "Well, I'd like to be able to compete in these early states, too, but I just can't. I'm guessing, though, that I'll still be relevant once Florida rolls around, and if I win that one, I'll be in a great position for Super Tuesday. I mean, really, how much can things change in a month?"
In other words, maybe this was less a deliberate, failed strategy than a necessary adjustment to reality.
...this makes me yearn for the day when women run everything.
Footnote: you can call me sexist if you want, but it's a scientific fact that every once in a while women get what we straight guys call "bad brain." Women get overwhelmed with emotion, and their rational faculties simply shut down. (There was this one time, for example, when my ex-girlfriend accused me of cheating on her before we started dating. No, she didn't have her timelines confused. She just thought that if my love were genuine, I would have anticipated that she and I would be together some day, and that I would have foresaken all others until that some day arrived. In a related story, my friend Tony tells me that his wife gets angry at him for days at a time after she has a dream that he has cheated on her.) That appears to be what happened with the NOW New York document.
Anklenote: and yes, ladies, I'm aware that there's a male equivalent of bad brain. I'm not sure what you call it, but it happens every once in a while when we become so inconsiderate, so self-absorbed, so thoughtless, so utterly clueless about appropriate regard for others, your bodies lurch into spasms of revulsion at the thought of ever having lain naked next to us.
It is amusing to see various Democrats starting to respond to the Clintons the way the rest of us have been for the past 15 years: "They'll say anything!" "It's always somebody else's fault!" "They're playing the race card!" "You need a full time fact-checker just to keep track of all the lies!"
Yeah, we know. Weren't you paying attention in the '90s?
Feherty is a golf announcer on CBS. (If you ever hear him, you'll recognize him instantly from his heavy Irish brogue.) He was on with Rome to talk primarily about golf, but he mentioned that he'd recently been to Iraq. He said that the trip changed his perception of what was going on there. Three things in particular surprised him: a) we're winning, b) troop morale is very high, c) our troops want to be allowed to finish the job. He said that you would never know this from reading media accounts of what's going on in Iraq.
I suspect that Feherty is about six months behind the curve on this stuff; he's not a political junkie or a newshound. He probably doesn't know that since the surge, media coverage has changed. Even so, here's a guy with no apparent agenda, a guy who said that he had understood the situation one way when he left for Iraq, and understood it another way by the time he was ready to come home.
I've heard this same basic story from journalists and politicians who have been to Iraq in the last six months -- this is a war that now looks winnable, if only the federal government will make the necessary commitment.
The Democrats don't want to make that commitment. The Republicans do. That alone is reason enough for me to vote GOP.
I don't have anything original to say on this subject. I have been astounded in recent days, however, to see: a) a magazine cover devoted to how Trista Rehn lost 30 pounds; and b) news stories speculating on whether or not Tom Brady is losing his hair.
The second one of these is actually slightly less offensive to me. Tom Brady is an incredibly accomplished athlete. He's done something in life worth paying attention to. I'm not sure why anyone would care about his hair loss, but I can see, at least, why people are interested in HIM.
But Trista Rehn? What in God's name has she done to merit anyone's attention? She was on a reality TV show five years ago. In my book, that alone doesn't make her worth our attention. But even if your life is so empty that you want to know more about her, didn't her 15 minutes come and go around 2003? What could possibly be interesting about her in 2008?
Well, she lost 30 pounds. So maybe all you new moms can take some inspiration from that. Maybe, but highly doubtful. The reason she was on TV in the first place is that she is genetically blessed. Plus, she managed to parlay her reality TV fame into a lot of cash -- cash that can pay for personal trainers, nannies to watch the kids while she works out, healthy foods instead of McDonald's, etc.
Does her experience really say anything to you about your life?
A Giuliani win in Florida. That will keep things interesting for Super Duper Tuesday.
