There is an almost perfect GOP candidate for

President out there, and his name is Newt Gingrich and ghod almighty help us he is "edging" towards announcing a run in 2012.

Sophomoric hauture?
CHECK
Hog-like love of money?
CHECK
Stellar record of draft dodging?
CHECK
Bully with a vulture's eye for easy pickin's?
CHECK
Narcissism?
CHECK
Book-Worshipper?
CHECK
Oh ghod I cannot wait for the debates up in NH...I just can't.

Meanwhile...Back in Massachusetts...

I just wanna report that Governor Patrick is "in fine whack" (to quote the late John Hay), beavering away at the excessive salaries paid to the chairmen of certain semi-independent boards & commissions.
I think salaries at that level ought to be capped at ten thousand below what the Governor gets, my reasoning being that the executive talent needed to run the Massachusetts Technology & Innovation Commission cannot exceed the executive talent to run the God Damned Commonwealth itself.
Besides there is plenty of managerial talent out there to be had for 100,000 a year, it's a recession out there, good bosses are languishing on relief.

There is something grimly ironic

about a "beloved" third world tyrant hiring mercenaries to slaughter his own people so that he and his trashy ne'er do well family can go on nickel and dimin' the nation.
Libya's Supreme Autocrat & xenophobe, Moamar Khadafi must import hired killers to keep his throne...What times we do live in.

So of course, faced with a crisis the President has called for Moamar Khadafi to "step down"... this means that by Monday morning Fox News & the Tea Partei will flip over to the side of the Libyan dictator.

Lost in the current round of union busting in Wisconsin

and serious head-busting in the Middle East was the news that Former State Senator Scott Brown has quite openly given the Tea Partei the finger.

His reasoning here is none too hard to divine, The TP did no business whatsoever in the Commonwealth in last year's election despite a lot of noise, bluster and his own public endorsement thereof.  Outside the state, Tea Partei money and volunteers are gonna be tied up in wreaking vengeance on Barack Obama in 2012...Besides Brown has ten million large in his kicks.
So in other words, the breeze has shifted and it is now safe for Brown to tack to the center with all the airy opportunism of a Mitt Romney.
Brown is even so cocky as to invite a Tea Partei primary challenge. This is cheap bluster if you asked me, the Teabaggers haven't the money, the organization or even a candidate of minimal competence and charisma to take down the Junior Senator...They know it and he chortles over it.
All of this points to Scott Brown's great and only discernable personal weakness, hubris, his head swells up and up on a hourly basis. Brown has gone from Local Cable Access to Sixty Minutes in one short year and of course it has all gone to his head.
Well, that alone is insufficient to displace him from office, the US Senate is not known for a humble membership, but it is a phenom that bears watching thats all.
And while we are doing that we need to start laying the policy groundwork for the race next year, what ideas will be in play?
What platform will be espoused?
That is really the only way to get at him, ideas, proposals...y'know the hard stuff.

Nothing so angers a wingnut

to to be held accountable to the very standards he'd impose on others by force even if all else failed.

Case in point: Newt "The Cowardly Lion" Gingrich who finally gets his marital rapsheet quoted back to him and predictably can't take it.

Congressman Capuano now apologizes...

for exhorting union protesters in Wisconsin and elsewhere to "get a little bloody".

I guess the usual suspects were all aghast at his confrontation rhetoric, Oh dear..oh my!

And yet...every morning on WTKK FM 96.9 equally hardcore sentiments amenable to wingnuts everywhere are broadcast freely on the public airwaves sans any reproof from the local news media.
Which points up a very very real problem, that we have come to expect & tolerate, violent rhetoric from avowed right wingers, it no longer registers....part of the background noise.
And that my friends, is a very bad thing indeed for the state of dee-bate in this hyar ree-public.

Is it a pre-condition to snagging a columnist gig

at the Boston Globe that you have to have a snarky commuter rail disdain for Public Service Unions?

Honest to Ghod is there anyone on the Op-Ed page of the Globe who likes the teacher's unions?
I for one think that is the democrats in the Wisconsin State Senate have to take extraordinary measures to compel their opponents to negotiate, well so be it, they have hardly been dealt a winning hand here.
I guess...there are some people out there who haven't got problem one with the teachers becoming the complete thralls of the state legislature.

It is never a good sign when...

Your personally selected, senior cabinet ministers start dimin' out your ass to the Swedish Tabloids.
I mean when Khadafi's picked henchmen start peddling nasty stories about The Leader well, it is definitely Albert Speer time.
Yesterday I thought Khadafi was gonna end up torn apart by a mob a'la Mussolini, today given his definite propensity for goin' down in a storm of blood I'm thinking he'll shoot himself when the time comes like Hitler.
Because the whole scene in Tripoli right now feels a lot like the Fall of Berlin circa 1945.

Former State Senator Jim Marzilli got three months in the slams

for ineffectually chasing soccer moms thru the streets of Lowell like a lusty young he-ape.
The State House can breath a puritanical sigh of relief and sundry characters therein can now go back to counting the leftover kickbacks from the Probation Department.

I will leave it to the acculmulated legal wisdom of our many local radio talk show tyrants to debate the justice of the sentence.

Colonel Khadafi (aka "The King of Kings and "The Revolutionary from the Tents")

Has vowed in a bloodcurdling speech on state television to "die a martyr" in defense of his manorial right to rule Libya like a seedy Plantation.

Yipes this has all the resonance of Mussolini's blustery declarations circa 1945 that he and "five thousand" picked blackshirts would die a Fascist Martyr's death in the Val Tellina in Northern Italy.
It all sounded heroic and defiant, but an hour later Il Duce was cravenly & fruitless  negotiating with the very partisans that had him surrounded.
And unless Khadafi has some serious thugs behind him, he will likely swing from his heels just like Mussolini.
All this would be funny except real people are dying in the streets while this crazy old man rants on and on.

Meanwhile when does this thing hit Cuba and North Korea...Or does it?

And the wind sighed Gameliel....

It is President's Day, and it's 6:56 pm EST as well, so you know ALL the really kewl President's (Jefferson,  Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Truman & Ford) have been profiled unto death both on and off line.
So let me take a moment to remember not the best, nor the brightest, not the bravest or even the staunchest, no, allow Humble Elias to devote a few lines of praise to Warren Gameliel Harding the Worst President of the United States ev-errrrrr.
He got nominated by the GOP in 1920, because everyone else had beaten themselves to death grasping for the Purple, he won because Henry Cabot Lodge told him to keep his mouth shut and say as little as possible (Truly he knew his man and his almighty vacuity) and once in office Harding guilelessly appointed every mook, porch-climber and highwayman in Ohio to Federal Office.
These guys were serious career criminals, the absolute scum of the Ohio Republican Party they thought nothing of stealing everything that was not nailed down from the damn Veteran's Administration and beyond!
And that was before all that oil-mishaugas at Teapot Dome Wyoming.
And yet when it all came out, Harding was appalled, he was too simple-minded to realize that he had spent his entire public life in the company of men whose gruesome lack of ethics would have shamed the Hells Angels.
But then that is what I like about Harding, he was human, not a neurotic self pitying Political Frankenstein's monster like Nixon or an aging fraud like Reagan, after Harding the Presidency would progressively become more and more image conscious until that imagery would literally consume the office.
Some men are simple and steadfast, the office fortifies them, not Warren Harding the whole thing crushed him to a pulp and in three short years too.
Harding cheated on his battle-ax of a wife incessantly, he drank god-awful Prohibition-era rotgut even as  he piously defended the Noble Experiment, played poker with the boys and freely admitted his complete ignorance of economics and diplomacy even as he signed whatever was put in front on him sans demure.
A proud Ohio Newspaper Editor before he got into politics, Harding was noted for his abysmal gaffes, unintelligible syntax and hopelessly inane speechmaking.
H.L. Mencken once observed that Harding "writes the worst english I have ever encountered...it reminds me of dogs barking idiotically thru endless nights".
 Even FDR felt pity for the guy, Harding was in over his head and everyone knew it, most of all Harding.
Still and all that, he wanted to make good, he meant well, for all his small town Sinclair Lewisian crassness, FDR once said that Harding was a courteous well meaning soul trapped in the wrong job.
He knew the guy and the Second Roosevelt was a shrewd judge of character.
And if Harding "made Heaven" it is because he set the Socialist Leader Eugene Debs free after he'd gone to the Federal Slams in 1917 for agitating against America's entry into World War One.
And when his old heart gave out, the country wept, signed and buried him in this preposterous mausoleum which stands today in Marion Ohio as a mute warning that ambition prepares us but poorly for the supreme challenges of life.

FYI...

North Eastern White Pride, a "White nationalist working class party" holds its monthly meetings at the Saxe Room of the Worcester Public Library.
The next scheduled white power confab is this Wednesday February 23rd from 7 to 9pm.

I post this information for the edification & education of all those interested in the lawful, full & free expression of their first amendment rights.

Colonel Khadaffi's son...

(you just know he had a son being trained up to assume the Imperial Purple) has warned all of Libya that the army is backing his father to the hilt and that Khadaffi Seniro will fight to the "last man, woman and bullet".

Shee-it Mussolini said the exact same thing in 1942....and look how it turned out for him...shot by partisans and strung up by his heels.
Frankly Khadaffi Junior sounds like he is whistling past the graveyard, threats of civil war or no civil war this thing has clearly slipped out of the Colonel's control.

Sigh....

I hate to say it, but Joanie Vennochi raises a legitimate question about our Junior Senator in her column in today's Globe....

"In light of his sexual abuse revelation, why did he (Scott Brown) back Jeff Perry?"

Perry a GOP stalwart and 2010 candidate for congress was once a police officer down the Cape who essentially did nothing while an underling improperly strip searched a teenaged girl.

Well, you could have heard the women's vote howling like Valkyries from the top of Falcon Ridge in Menotomy.

But of course on his long road to disaster Perry was endorsed by Junior Senator Scott Brown, late in the campaign waa-ay down on the Cape, but still Scott did his best to blow on those embers to no avail.

My own view is, that Scott Brown like all successful politicians has a blatantly forensic type mentality, he is all about how much he stands to gain, how much he can get away with.

That is his normal condition...

So maybe just maybe banging the pots for a sleazebag like Perry awakened certain thoughts and memories in the mind of Former State Senator Brown.

The whole weight of the situation might not have hit Brown until he was well over the Sagamore Bridge.

That at least is the charitable construction Humble Elias is gonna put on the whole matter...At least until otherwise noted.

Child abuse does happen, custom, law and the police are the three tiered fire wall that are supposed to defend children in the final extremity, sad to say, then and now that barrier is awfully undependable.

***

Anyway this is all about personalities and right now I'm more interested in what sort of a platform the democrats will nail together for the 2012 senate race.

In a time of recession...

With New Hampshire stalked by unemployment, underemployment and chronic poverty, the republican dominated state legislature in Concord has unerring zeroed in on the real problem afflicting the Granite State, outlawing GAY MARRIAGE!

My Ghod these mooks have not been sworn in for five weeks and they have already found a nice devisive witch hunt to allegedly beguile and inflame the masses.
Sickening is the word for it.
Typical GOP behavior in a recession though, ramp out the social issues and hand out torches with which to go screaming thru the streets.
I mean forget about job creation...
Not fer nuthin' though, but a majority up there supports the retention of gay marriage...Per the polling cited above, so just what is the GOP doing in New Hampshire other than getting their rocks off while the plain people starve??

Meanwhile Wisconsin

seems to have gotten it's 1848 on.

Humble Elias is completely with the teachers on this one. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (a tea partei lackey from all accounts) is trying to outlaw collective bargaining by the public sector unions, except of course, the police (well someone has to lock up all those demonstrators!).
Typical radical conservative hypocrisy if you asked me.
Frankly, teaching your miserable little brats has got to be the worst job in the world. Typically your average teacher has to acculturate her kids to living in civil society, teach their little knotheads when they aren't desperately trying to get them past some god-damned state mandated proficiency exam.
And that isn't when they aren't dealing with outright sociopathic parents who have inculcated their DNA admixtures with the notion that courtesy is a confession of weakness and winning at any cost is a religious dictate.
And all of this done for shit pay that wouldn't buy white walls for a radio talk show host.
These days the only comparable to teaching for sheer unadulterated awfulness is either rookie cop or the county coroner.
So hell yeah I say Wisconsin teachers should strike and strike HARD!
Otherwise they will become the complete thralls & lackeys of the state legislature (a similar arrangement just worked soo well in the Probation Department in Massachusetts)...Maybe that is a perfect set up for someone like Brian McGrory, but any sane citizen must see this as a potential disaster.

Sooo...

When does good old Cuba erupt into demonstrations and or riots?
I mean sheesh, the Maximum Leader's knuckledragging brother was eased seamlessly into the Big Job...How medieval can you get??
Just sayin' seein' as how this thing has gone all "1848" on us, just remember the Big Winner in 1848 was Louis Napoleon Future Emperor of France.

Scot Lehigh

goes sighing after the soothing syrup of compromise in today's Boston Globe column.
He has the entirely unoriginal and neoconish notion that if those darn democrats and republicans down in Washington could just get together and compromise with manly bipartisanship, the budget deficit would get solved overnight.
THEY would have to swallow tax increases...
WE would have to chow down on "entitlement reform"...or so he argues more or less.

Usually this is where I snark off about Scot and his neconish notions, but today I will only add that sometimes compromise is in the worst interests of the Nation and our Progeny. Operationally speaking it is hard to compromise with politicians whose base requires them to wallow in increasingly paranoid eliminationist fantasies...But then that should be obvious to everyone at this point.
More importantly I'm just gonna add the counterintuitive point that in a deep jobless recession, worrying about the damn deficit really ought to be put off to another day.
Getting people back on the job, paying taxes and spending money is an of itself a strong deficit reduction tactic.
Full bellies make better decisions on the deficit, getting stampeded into some grand desperate plan to reduce Federal spending now is a formula for disaster. Stern measures are taken more easily in phat times.
But
Then
Humble Elias isn't an economist, but then neither is Scot Lehigh

Iran versus Egypt

The political differences at play between these two strife torn nations couldn't be more stark.
In Egypt an aged and infirm autocrat dithered and snarled while the masses when parading in the streets demanding "change".
Up until then the old man's plan was to hand off power to his Ne'er Do Well son like he was Comrade Kim in North Korea or something.
Well of course we all saw how well that plan played out, millions took to the streets, the secret police ran home in sheer terror (at last word they were still hiding under the bed), the ruling party's biffsquads proved a bunch of cowardly porch climbers and the army stopped taking the Leader's phone calls.
Now, looking back, it's a miracle Mubarek lasted as long as he did.
In Iran though, the situation is different.
The regime has the middle class, the young, and the intelligensia thoroughly terrorized, divided and co-opted, their paramilitaries are well trained and ferocious, the secret police haven't lost their nerve, the Leader is a nervy sociopath and the army is well away from the center of power.
I mean right now the "opposition" is nervously filling out paperwork asking permission to stage a rally in support of the Egyptian uprising.
Right now, advantage to Ahmadinejad and his backers.
Still...It is grimly hilarious to recall that only last week President Ahmadinejad was congratulating the protesters in Cairo for toppling Mubarek only to be tear gassing those same protesters in Tehran yesterday when they called for his ouster.
It is an irony equal only to the powers of observation given to a George Orwell...

Ye Ghods...

You mean Mitt Romney doesn't have Nevada tucked into his electoral back pocket yet?
Thats a switch, Nevada was easy Mormon-rich territory for Romney in 2008, now per Matt Visor's above article, Sharon Angle & her Tea Partei legionaries are supposedly waiting to eat the Former Viceroy's lunch.
Interesting...
Said article also notes that South Carolina and Iowa are also very iffy for Romney if not outright hostile territory on the GOP presidential primary map.
So if you add it all together, then New Hampshire becomes Mitt's firewall must win state next year.
On paper he ought to win it in a walk (currently he is polling well up there but he hardly has a lock on the Granite State). However let us not forget, Romney is one of two Massachusetts pols who lost the New Hampshire Presidential Primary (the other being the late Edward Maximus)...and this is Willard we are talking about, he has a zen-like affinity for turning triumph into catastrophe.
New Hampshire is a mercurial primary state in a volatile presidential election, a lot can happen to upend the conventional wisdom.
Shit, right now an ass-clown like Donald Trump could blitz the Granite State and pull off a Eugene McCarthy in the dead of night.
Granted I doubt very strongly Trump will get in, he loves attention, not full on press scrutiny, and his campaign finance filings will be epic reading to be sure.
No...It may not be Trump but it will be someone.
If I was running against Romney I'd challenge him in his strongest areas, his alleged job creation skills and his record as a super-manager. I'd forget about health care, likely Mitt is well armored in that area. Break him where he thinks he is strong, that much he won't suspect.
And whatever you do, don't let him cop to being the only grown up in the room.

Romney & CPAC

It has now become a tradition, Mitt Romney goes down to the annual CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee convention), grovels, snarls and then comes in second to some giddy wowser in the straw poll.
This year he got bested by a full seven points by Ron Paul, the semi-demented congressman and all around full time Objectivist Mystic.
Romney won the CPAC poll but usually in years when his opposition was declining for whatever reason to spend the money on buffet tables and banners.
It isn't hard to see why Mitt Romney has these problems, he hasn't an iota of charisma to obscure his money and buttress his good looks, he is shamelessly opportunistic in a really annoying way and is utterly incapable to projecting even the simplest air of sincerity.
He claims ad nauseum to be a super manager of huge enterprises, yet he churlishly walked out on the biggest job he ever got (the Governorship of Massachusetts) to chase the Presidential will-o-th'-wisp.
Lotsa baggage there quite frankly.
But he does have certain strengths for all that, lacking rhetorical gifts Romney nonetheless excels at painting his opponents as inexperienced fools and malevolent extremists.
He is a past master of the "butter wouldn't melt in his mouth" school of sanctimony.
It is how he successively dismissed Jane "Jingle Money" Swift from the Governorship and how he beat Shannon O'Brien in the General Election in 2002.
He makes himself look plausible but only in comparison to the opposition he faces.
Conversely, Romney withers whenever the spotlight blazes down on him alone, the more he tries to move people in a positive way the more they seem to dislike him.
Romney lost the New Hampshire Primary three years ago in part because he authorized two minute campaign commercials on the eve of the vote that reeked of desperation, they looked and sounded like hostage videos shot on the banks of the Merrimac River.
My point is, he can win elections (at least one at any rate) but his methods therein are thoroughly Bushian in nature, push em' into the mud and run away denying all responsibility.
There is little that has happened so far to suggest that Romney's rhetorical skills have improved so it is very likely if he is to be a playa in 2012 he is gonna have to resort to what works for him.
Sanctimonious backstabbery.

Oh well

So much for a crabby old man's cussed stubborness eh?

Still who inherits?
Yet another General, the scion of a military elite that has lost four wars in a row...

My question is, with promises in hand does the Middle Class go home having ousted Mubarek and his graspy family from power...or does the revolution move to the next stage?

Oh and Libya...is Colonel Khadafi next??

Mubarek refuses to step down...

If it wasn't costing people's lives, I could almost admire his cussedness.
Peron clinged to power like this, oblivious and without dignity but stubborn in defense of his right to wield the whip right to the last.
Still, there is a vacuum here and politics abhors a vacuum, I doubt it would take much more than a company of well motivated Egyptian infantry to enter Mubarek's hide out take him by the elbow and hustle him to the nearest airfield and a splendid exile in Madrid.
Who'd stop them?
No one I'd wager.
We are past endgame with this guy, the question in my mind is, can we deal with whatever and whoever comes after him?

HaleyBarbourstan (Y'know, the Magnolia State)

AKA Mississippi wants to put noted Confederate Cavalry General/Terrorist/Racist, Nathan Bedford Forrest on it's license plate.
The Commonwealth could not top that for loutish inanity if we put Lizzie Bordern bloody axe and all on our license plate.
Ah but according to Virginia's elementary school history textbooks "thousands" of blacks fought for the Confederacy...
Isn't it funny how there isn't a single war memorial down in Dixie to all the African American's who died defending state's rights and human bondage?
Maybe Haley Barbour could scare up a few to put on a license plate...If he got a start now he might find one of these "volunteers" by the time the 2012 New Hampshire Primary rolled around?

Less than a full month ago...

Mitt Romney was being cautiously lauded on the Front Page of the Boston Globe for his declination of the tea partei Kool-Aid.
He was "dissing the tea partei" to quote myself.
I further observed:

The primary season is a full year away and "Brand Romney" has still plenty of time to change up their plans and start abjectly groveling before the shock troops of Republican Conservatism.
And now today here is the proof of the above prediction Romney has clumsily rewritten his dumbass book to include all kinds of freeper talking points for the paperback edition.
Let the groveling and flip floppery BEGIN!
Meanwhile why does the Boston Globe seem to fall for Mitt's bullshit every time?
They are one and all emotionally invested in the delusion that Willard Mitt Romney is a nice Charles Percy style moderate republican...unthreatening and a worthwhile negotiating partner.
Willard's untrustworthiness and spineless truckling to wingbnuttery have been demonstrated time and gain and yet the Globe is desperate to go on believing.
It has become downright strange if you ask me.

The labor unions in Egypt

have come out hard against Hosni Mubarek.

So I guess that means the anti Mubarek protesters have lost the critical patronage of Jeff Jacoby.
Geez if the Teacher's Union in Cairo takes to the streets, Brian McGrory will be banging the pots for Mubarek before sundown.

KIDDING
KIDDING
KIDDING!
I Kid because I love
I love
To kid!
We all know that Boston Globe columnists are completely resistant to the ravages of cognitive dissonance....
Still in all honesty, a big general strike might be the safest and most effective and non-violent means to effect regime change in Egypt.

We suffer when

conservatives are stuffed into the state legislatures.
No sooner are they sworn in than they start writhing on the floor speaking in tongues, brandishing revolvers like they are Deputy Barney Fife and looking for someone, anyone as long as they are sorta weak & ineffectual to rough up.
Case in point, the New Hampshire State Legislature which is planning to fly in the face of a fifty years of settled practice and jurisprudence by trying to restrict the voting rights of college students.
Mighod these mooks are serious the law they propose will not only prevent the Dartmouth Review from voting for Michele Bachmann but it will likely also prevent active-duty soldiery from NH from exercising the franchise.
The GOP super majority in Concord is saying to all the world, "we like student-interns and we can send them out for lunch and get them to pick up our dry cleaning, but we don't like it when they vote..."
The Granite State is still mired in recession and this is what the citzenry's representatives think is a priority.
Not for nothing, but it won't stop undergraduates from volunteering on campaigns, most of Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy's legionaries couldn't vote at all in 1968.
No this is more of the politics of grievance at work, they guys just wanna give someone a hard time, it's an ongoing conservative fixation quite frankly.
Anything to punish the liberals I guess, no matter who get beat up in the process...

Spotted on Drydock Avenue in South Boston

Former Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy nattily turned out in a "Citizen's Energy" windbreaker and looking uncommonly hale and hearty.
I took no picture, as it was lunchtime and the man was clearly at the buffet in a private capacity.

Damn me but the man has at least three good campaigns left in him easy.
Ah but the world on the street is, he has lost all interest in the Great Game.
Helluva shame, his 1986 campaign for Congress was good old fashioned shoe leather political fun from start to finish.
Joe if'n you ever change yer mind, I still fit into my grenadier's uniform and the guy down the street with sharpen my assegai on short notice!

Texas and the NFL got into a

serious stupidity contest this weekend, and it came down to a dead tie.

You mean to tell me that the biggest loudest crassest football worshipping state in the union can't pull off the Superbowl without bungling the seating for 400 or so rabid gridiron fans?
Texas and it's shitkicker mojo are done mah frenz.
What would Lyndon Johnson say to such a inept loutish spectacle?
Texas is polluted, crime ridden, ruled by blustery book worshippers and crotch deep in firearms...and they can't even execute the god-damned Superbowl.
Don't worry they've got Rick "Secesh"Perry as their Governor, a veritable incubus in Chinese made cowboy boots.
Granted he is dumber than a bag of hammers and more belligerent than a drunken teachable but Governor Perry will find some way to blame the whole mishaugas all on the EPA or illegal aliens or Henry Agard Wallace, count on it.

It is Ronald Reagan's 100th Birthday

And from the looks of things, the poor senile bastard is well on his way to Public Sainthood.

Maybe they ought to name a reliable high end brand of men's hair coloring after him or rouge one or the other.
Pundits love occasions like this because it allows them the opportunity to indulge in their favorite sport the generation of rhetorical questions. Lou Cannon for example is quoted in Today's Boston Globe wondering "if" Ronald Reagan would be comfortable with "today's GOP"?
My guess is, the late President would be fine with it.
First and foremost Reagan was an A-List opportunistic windbag, most of the four myths of modern conservatism (those being Christian Politics, Rugged Individualism, the Virtue of Small Government and myth of Conservative Grievance) were all forged at one time or another by Reagan.
If his heirs seek to make corrupt mockery of his commandments or use them to make a hash of the US Constitution, well the man has been measured for his harp and cannot enforce order among his political progeny even if he was ever so inclined.
No...What Lou Cannon is really asking is, "can today's pundit ever be comfortable with the modern GOP?"
I mean lord knows they do bend over backwards for hopelessly inane dingbats like John Boehner and Newt Gingrich...and what does it get them?
Bupkiss that what they get.
Otherwise the base screams for pundit blood when the news runs bad for the Republicans while the so called leadership chuckle and make veiled threats against "The Liberal Media".
Twenty years of bending over backwards for this rabble hasn't done much good for the punditariat, hence their ambivalence.
That doesn't stop them from toadying on and on...but it does give them qualms.
None of which is the case when the democrats are in power, the media demonstrates it's even handedness by carpet bombing the liberals every time.
My advise to the democrats is simple, you can't make nice to lackey's and expect them to "man up" any time soon, cut them dead and see if the shock does em' any good sex Humble Elias.

Y'know I like

Barney Frank and a part of me is rotten glad he is running for re-election come-what-may.
The man is a fighter and he gives no quarter, we need someone like him in our congressional delegation.
But th' reality is, we are losing a seat in the US House next year and we are waaa-ay past due for a "come to Jesus" moment among our congresspersons...One of them needs to retire, an ambassadorship could be easily secured or a nice comfy office in the Kennedy School.
Something...anything.
I think Governor Patrick and Speaker DeLeo and Senate President Murray all need to quietly come up with a plan and avoid a ruinous primary fight...Hope them three read this blog.
Doubtful but a guy can hope nonethless.

As much as we decry the

mounting chaos in Egypt (which includes savage attacks on journalists, mostly from Pro-Mubarek thuggees) it is important to note that this same template worked like gangbusters in Iran when it came time for Mahmoud Achmadinejad to crack down hard on his opponents.
On the other hand, busting heads is a desperate strategy if you don't have the army to back you up 100%, when DeGaulle was faced with widespread street protests in 1968 he had the armed forces' backing from the git go...this doesn't seem to be the case for Mubarek, the Egyptian military seems to be trying to referee the whole mishaugas.
I suspect in the absence of a sudden break in Mubarek's favor that course of action is gonna get old quickly.

I'm not so sure if

Jeff Jacoby should be shaking his pom-poms in glee about the impending ouster of Hosni Mubarek and the vindication of GWB's "Freedom Agenda" in Egypt.

I mean some of those demonstrators aren't exactly contributing members of the ADL.
And why is Jeff still alibi-ing for George Bush??

Charlotte North Carolina?

when it comes to siting the 2012 Democratic National Convention I'd pick Manchester New Hampshire before Charlotte...That is until someone reminded me that Obama carried North Carolina in 2008 and the last three Governors of that state have been democrats.
I thought we were "dished diddled and done" in Dixie?
Seems like there is still some snap left in those garters.
Of course who knows if we can hold onto North Carolina in 2012, a Palin-Romney ticket might be our best bet at this point.

John Kerry is at the end of the day,

a team player.
So if he is calling for Hosni Mubarek's resignation it would have to be with the tacit consent of Obama Administration.
So I'd say the bell is tolling for the House of Mubarek.

Meanwhile, Romney is also calling for Mubarek to resign, and if Hosni skeedaddles tonight or tomorrow, Mitt will spend the rest of the winter telling the Epsom NH Republican Town Committee he personally deposed the President of Egypt.

To quote the late great Billy Bunter

Hosni Mubarek is "Dished, Diddled and DONE!"

If the Egyptian army is publicly swearing off the use of force against the demonstrators, then with what hold does Mubarek have over the pending negotiation process?
None.
Sounds like the High Command superceded his sick old self, likely they are already casting around for a suitably vigorous & legitimate successor.
One thing is for sure, it ain't gonna be Mubarek's ne'er do well eldest son.
Egypt has its problems but at least it isn't Syria with it's Supreme Opthalmalocrat,AKA  the surviving Son of the Late President for Life Hafez El Assad.
So it is no accident that the Muslim Brotherhood has suddenly hit the streets, the coast is clear so to speak...
I give Mubarek a week before he is bundled onto a jetliner and flow into exile in say...Madrid.
Up until yesterday he still had a chance at a "DeGaulle moment" but that depended on picking off the loyalty or at least the fear of the Egyptian middle class and holding club of the army over the proceedings...Both axes of his policy are busted up good at this point.
My only question is, how big a playa will the army be in the succession negotiations? Can they get another General in there or will the demonstrators be able to force the issue?
We will soon find out.