Ay yi yi.

If he really didn't want to be president, why the bruising attack ads against his rivals? (And where did they go when it came time to run against Obama?)

In an interview with the Boston Globe examining what went wrong with the Romney campaign, his eldest son Tagg explains that his father had been a reluctant candidate from the start.

After failing to win the 2008 Republican nomination, Romney told his family he would not run again and had to be persuaded to enter the 2012 White House race by his wife Ann and son Tagg.

"He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life. He had no desire... to run," Tagg Romney said. "If he could have found someone else to take his place... he would have been ecstatic to step aside."

Certainly Perry appeared to be a good candidate -- on paper, I mean; and we all know how that ultimately turned out -- at his debut. Why then did Romney scorch him, if he was happy to let someone else run?

I'm not sure I believe this.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (237)
Post contains 203 words, total size 1 kb.

One bowl game tonight, the Hawaii Bowl, Fresno State and SMU, of all things.

The "bettin it all on Hawaii" is an anecdote from Ace, I heard in Sept of 2011 when we were in a small gathering, smoking smokey things in a cigar bar and sipping on adult beverages. He used the phrase "bettin it all on Hawaii" with respect to politics and a couple of us (me included) were clueless as to what that meant. He splained, "the hardcore college football gambler will place bets on games as they progress through time zones. If he's had a bad day he will go for broke on the latest game there is, which will be whoever is playing Hawaii U."

It's a lot like betting on ORCA I think.

Anyway, Merry Christmas you goofballs. I hope it's a good one for you and all those you loves.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:37 PM | Comments (70)
Post contains 169 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: Ace at 02:52 PM | Comments (102)
Post contains 5 words, total size 1 kb.

Well it's week 16 and my Steelers are eliminated from playoff contention. I just hope the NHL and NHLPA resolve their issues so I have something to watch for the next few months.

Leaderboard
DaveinNC's SWAG Picks: 135
drstnly1: 135
Portnoy: 133
Black Palm Syndicate: 132
the botnet: 131
rdm1155: 131

Management
Ben: 126
JWF: 123
Andy: 119
JohnE: 115
CDR M: 110
RD: 109

The winner of the Co-blogger fantasy football league was...me. I won. It wasn't even close. I won by like 20 points. I could have given the other team 9 of my points and I still would have won.

The other moron fantasy football league doesn't wrap up until next week.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:45 AM | Comments (19)
Post contains 133 words, total size 1 kb.

Hello! And Merry Christmas' Eve!

You've probably read this but I'm behind on everything and besides I've wanted to write about a point made in it.

Since the humiliations of November, the Right no longer has any hot brands, so this time round the biens pensants have fallen back on "gun culture." Dimwit hacks bandy terms like "assault weapon," "assault rifle," "semi-automatic" and "automatic weapon" in endlessly interchangeable but ever more terrifying accumulations of high-tech state-of-the-art killing power. As the comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted, "When the 2nd Amendment was written the most lethal gun available was the musket."

Actually, the semiautomatic is a 19th century technology, first produced in 1885. That's just under half-a-century after the death of Madison, the Second Amendment's author, and rather nearer to the Founding Fathers' time than our own. And the founders were under fewer illusions about the fragility of society than Hollywood funnymen: on July 25, 1764, four Lenape Indians walked into a one-room schoolhouse in colonial Pennsylvania and killed Enoch Brown and ten of his pupils. One child survived, scalped and demented to the end of his days.

Nor am I persuaded by the Right's emphasis on pre-emptive mental-health care. It's true that, if your first reaction on hearing breaking news of this kind is to assume the perpetrator is a male dweeb in his early twenties with poor socialization skills, you're unlikely to be wrong. But, in a society with ever fewer behavioral norms, who's to say what's odd? On 9/11, the agent at the check-in desk reckoned Mohammed Atta and his chums were a bit strange but banished the thought as shameful and discriminatory. In a politically correct world, vigilance is a fool's errand. The US Airways cabin crew who got the "flying imams" bounced from a Minneapolis plane for flamboyantly, intimidatingly wacky behavior (praying loudly, fanning out to occupy all the exit rows, asking for seatbelt extenders they didn't need) wound up in sensitivity-training hell. If a lesbian thinks dragging your wife around in a head-to-toe body-bag is kinda weird, she's being "Islamophobic." If a Muslim thinks taking breast hormones and amputating your penis is a little off, he's "transphobic." These very terms make the point that, in our society, finding somebody else odd is itself a form of mental illness. In an unmoored age, what's not odd? Once upon a time, TV viewers from distant states descending on a Connecticut town to attend multiple funerals of children they don't know might have struck some of us as, at best, unseemly and, at worst, deeply creepy – a Feast of the Holy Innocents, so to speak.

OK, what about restricting it to wishing murderous ill upon someone? In her own response to the Sandy Hook slaughter, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that hopes for gun control would be greatly advanced "if sizable numbers of NRA members become gun-victims." Who's to know when violent fantasies on social media prefigure a loner getting ready to mow down the kindergarten or just a critically acclaimed liberal novelist amusing her friends before the PEN Awards cocktail party?

On this last point, something occurred to me. It's obvious, I guess, but worth noting anyway.

As the State creates more prohibitions and steals more freedoms, it experiences an unavoidable problem: Those who administer or at least vigorously support the Prohibitive State discover that the laws they wish to inflict on others are uncomfortable straitjackets on themselves.

For example, this statement by Joyce Carol Oates. I take it as a given that Ms. Oates would strongly urge the State to investigate, harass, and imprison anyone on the detestable right making a similar statement about who on the left should be killed by gun violence. And yet, as Steyn notes, we all understand -- even those of us who oppose the socialist project -- that Ms. Oates is to be excepted from the sort of controlling regime she favors.

Rosie O'Donnell's bodyguards can carry handguns, for example. She's Important; it is therefore Important that her life should be protected, by use of a gun's deadly force, should it come to that.

The number of celebrities and powerful people who have either paid armed guards or who have a gun themselves (gotta protect yourself from a stalker) is fairly large.

Which brings me to my point: As the State increases in its ambition to Decide for us, those at the top of the control structure naturally look to excuse themselves from the blessings of Government Surveillance and Prohibition they would so generously grant to us all. And more and more what should be a liberal governance (old meaning of liberal) becomes a decidedly illiberal one, one in which Actions are not paramount, but Status.

Rosie O'Donnell can agitate for all the gun bans she likes -- she knows she'll never actually have to live under them. Her Status will make an exception for her. It is the lesser citizens of the lower castes to whom these laws will apply.

And Joyce Carol Oates? Well, a no-account Tea Partier who incited violence should surely be locked up for breaking some law or another (as the Egyptian filmmaker was). But Joyce Carol Oates has High Status in the regime -- those who administer the State are friends with people who are friends with Oates -- and so she will be excused from such persecutions.

A liberal governance -- again, I mean it in the old way -- takes each man as equal and judges his actions only. But a government determined to make decisions for everyone and criminalize anything that it doesn't actually mandate must begin making these determinations based on Status, because it's the people with Status who have the ear of officials or friends in the media.

And so we start finding ourselves becoming more like the Soviets we thought we defeated, with classes afforded greater or lesser privileges depending on how close they might be to Government Power.

Posted by: Ace at 08:38 AM | Comments (261)
Post contains 1009 words, total size 6 kb.

Hello! And Merry Christmas' Eve!

You've probably read this but I'm behind on everything and besides I've wanted to write about a point made in it.

Since the humiliations of November, the Right no longer has any hot brands, so this time round the biens pensants have fallen back on "gun culture." Dimwit hacks bandy terms like "assault weapon," "assault rifle," "semi-automatic" and "automatic weapon" in endlessly interchangeable but ever more terrifying accumulations of high-tech state-of-the-art killing power. As the comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted, "When the 2nd Amendment was written the most lethal gun available was the musket."

Actually, the semiautomatic is a 19th century technology, first produced in 1885. That's just under half-a-century after the death of Madison, the Second Amendment's author, and rather nearer to the Founding Fathers' time than our own. And the founders were under fewer illusions about the fragility of society than Hollywood funnymen: on July 25, 1764, four Lenape Indians walked into a one-room schoolhouse in colonial Pennsylvania and killed Enoch Brown and ten of his pupils. One child survived, scalped and demented to the end of his days.

Nor am I persuaded by the Right's emphasis on pre-emptive mental-health care. It's true that, if your first reaction on hearing breaking news of this kind is to assume the perpetrator is a male dweeb in his early twenties with poor socialization skills, you're unlikely to be wrong. But, in a society with ever fewer behavioral norms, who's to say what's odd? On 9/11, the agent at the check-in desk reckoned Mohammed Atta and his chums were a bit strange but banished the thought as shameful and discriminatory. In a politically correct world, vigilance is a fool's errand. The US Airways cabin crew who got the "flying imams" bounced from a Minneapolis plane for flamboyantly, intimidatingly wacky behavior (praying loudly, fanning out to occupy all the exit rows, asking for seatbelt extenders they didn't need) wound up in sensitivity-training hell. If a lesbian thinks dragging your wife around in a head-to-toe body-bag is kinda weird, she's being "Islamophobic." If a Muslim thinks taking breast hormones and amputating your penis is a little off, he's "transphobic." These very terms make the point that, in our society, finding somebody else odd is itself a form of mental illness. In an unmoored age, what's not odd? Once upon a time, TV viewers from distant states descending on a Connecticut town to attend multiple funerals of children they don't know might have struck some of us as, at best, unseemly and, at worst, deeply creepy – a Feast of the Holy Innocents, so to speak.

OK, what about restricting it to wishing murderous ill upon someone? In her own response to the Sandy Hook slaughter, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that hopes for gun control would be greatly advanced "if sizable numbers of NRA members become gun-victims." Who's to know when violent fantasies on social media prefigure a loner getting ready to mow down the kindergarten or just a critically acclaimed liberal novelist amusing her friends before the PEN Awards cocktail party?

On this last point, something occurred to me. It's obvious, I guess, but worth noting anyway.

As the State creates more prohibitions and steals more freedoms, it experiences an unavoidable problem: Those who administer or at least vigorously support the Prohibitive State discover that the laws they wish to inflict on others are uncomfortable straitjackets on themselves.

For example, this statement by Joyce Carol Oates. I take it as a given that Ms. Oates would strongly urge the State to investigate, harass, and imprison anyone on the detestable right making a similar statement about who on the left should be killed by gun violence. And yet, as Steyn notes, we all understand -- even those of us who oppose the socialist project -- that Ms. Oates is to be excepted from the sort of controlling regime she favors.

Rosie O'Donnell's bodyguards can carry handguns, for example. She's Important; it is therefore Important that her life should be protected, by use of a gun's deadly force, should it come to that.

The number of celebrities and powerful people who have either paid armed guards or who have a gun themselves (gotta protect yourself from a stalker) is fairly large.

Which brings me to my point: As the State increases in its ambition to Decide for us, those at the top of the control structure naturally look to excuse themselves from the blessings of Government Surveillance and Prohibition they would so generously grant to us all. And more and more what should be a liberal governance (old meaning of liberal) becomes a decidedly illiberal one, one in which Actions are not paramount, but Status.

Rosie O'Donnell can agitate for all the gun bans she likes -- she knows she'll never actually have to live under them. Her Status will make an exception for her. It is the lesser citizens of the lower castes to whom these laws will apply.

And Joyce Carol Oates? Well, a no-account Tea Partier who incited violence should surely be locked up for breaking some law or another (as the Egyptian filmmaker was). But Joyce Carol Oates has High Status in the regime -- those who administer the State are friends with people who are friends with Oates -- and so she will be excused from such persecutions.

A liberal governance -- again, I mean it in the old way -- takes each man as equal and judges his actions only. But a government determined to make decisions for everyone and criminalize anything that it doesn't actually mandate must begin making these determinations based on Status, because it's the people with Status who have the ear of officials or friends in the media.

And so we start finding ourselves becoming more like the Soviets we thought we defeated, with classes afforded greater or lesser privileges depending on how close they might be to Government Power.

Posted by: Ace at 08:38 AM | Add Comment
Post contains 1009 words, total size 6 kb.

'Tis the season for holiday traditions like 24 Hours of A Christmas Story on TBS, arguing with your drunken uncle Bill over aunt Sue's patented extra-dry turkey and, of course, Christmas music.

There are some great songs and some real stinkers. I personally detest any version of Little Drummer Boy with the heat of a thousand suns. Pa-rump-a-pum-pum ... WTF is that all about?

My absolute favorite Christmas song/version, though, is below the fold. Offer up your likes and dislikes in the comments. more...

Posted by: andy at 09:47 AM | Comments (234)
Post contains 133 words, total size 1 kb.

There are some great photos on this site, although all of them are interesting. Perhaps it is overly romanticizing the times, but seeing these photos reminds me that we were, and hopefully will be a great nation.

(click to embiggen)

[Update]:

Moron 'Nevergiveup' sends this photo of his dad:

Capt. Nevergiveup Sr., Iwo Jima: 19Feb1945, First wave 4th Marines

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:02 AM | Comments (166)
Post contains 71 words, total size 1 kb.

It's one of the classic cocktails, and one that is ruined more often than not -- usually by bad booze. Use the best rye whiskey you can get, or in a pinch, good bourbon. But for God's sake, don't use crappy Canadian whiskey. And for a twist, use a twist...of lemon peel.

Oh, and don't be intimidated by bitters. They add a zing to drinks that can be fantastic. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:35 AM | Comments (168)
Post contains 167 words, total size 1 kb.

Some of Vic's headlines:

Good Morning Morons. Today is Monday, December 24, 2012. On this day in 1814 the Treaty of Ghent was signed ending the war of 1812. The only thing the U.S. gained in this war was the national anthem, rubble in Washington DC, and the onset of "The Era of Good Feelings." The British viewed the war as a sideshow in the overall Napoleonic Wars. The fact is that the U.S., like all the rest of the wars down to WWII, was not prepared for this war.

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:14 AM | Comments (187)
Post contains 493 words, total size 3 kb.