David Bernstein from da Boston Phoenix

(who is a better writer than me in every way) breaks down High Pitched Rick Santorum's chances in New Hampshire if he can pull off a last minute upset in Iowa.
Well, the only thing I can dare add is that one thing that makes New Hampshire a unique presidential primary state, is that pure luck can play a big part in the outcome.
So that having been said, I have my doubts as to whether or not Rick Santorum, nasty screech and all can fill an "inside straight" at the last minute.
Of course, if Santorum did manage to finish in the money, that would just be too hilarious for words and proof positive that the AntiMitt right will vote for anyone up to and including a would be American Dictator or some random road kill over Romney.

Affirmations...

I suspect that Mitt Romney has a "life coach" who is trying to make over a cold detached & boring oligarch   into "Ronald Reagan".

So every day in as sincere a voice as he can muster, Romney must chant "I AM...Ronald Reagan, I AM...Sincere. I WAS...a Great Governor, I WILL BE a game changer as President!"

This goes on three times a day into Romney's bathroom mirror. No doubt as part of coaching process, the Former Governor of Massachusetts will be coaxed to start affecting "Gipper style" football helmets, cowboy gear or that ghod awful green plaid summer suit Reagan wore to a NATO summit in his first term.

(Ghod he looked like The Riddler...)

But on it goes with Mitt Romney, the chanting, "I AM... Ronald Reagan, I HAVE...Rock Solid Conservative Principles!"

Until one night, the life coach's audio lab gets Romney's "Sleep learning CD" mixed up and this affirmation gets piped into his ear buds "I AM...Al Smith, I WAS the First Catholic ever nominated by a major party for President!"

Apparently,

Former State Senator Scott Brown drove all the way to South Boston (I guarantee you he had to use GPS to find it) to proclaim himself The Underdog in the upcoming US Senate Race.
Yeah thass right, an Underdog with fifteen million dollars in campaign funds at his disposal, raised in less than two years and most of it from the Usual Suspects on Wall Street.
Underdog indeed.
But then, all this proves is that Brown is a fervent reader of the Chimes at Midnight, after all Humble Elias predicted last month that would try to revert to his 2010 status as the scrappy challenger.
It is a pretty brazen move and a good indicator for whoever ends up being Brown's main opponent in the general election next fall.

For sheer comedy nothing beats

watching Texas Governor Rick Perry flailing around on the ground, ineffectually snapping his fangs at passersby and stuttering imprecations against gays, women with unlocked wombs and the vast menacing saracen hordes.
Six short months ago, he was a Rightical Chic Godling, a Romulus a Titan....Now look at him?
An ass-clown's ass clown.
And all Perry did to initiate this stupendous political pratfall, was open his mouth and speak on the record.
As I've said before, in Perry we have an authentic rarity, a republican who simply too stupid to be President.
Hell, I'm not sure Rick Perry's campaign staff are sanguine about leaving the Governor alone with a box of matches at this point.
Still, ya gotta give him credit, any normal politician who ran up a string of idioitic gaffes like Rick Perry would have quit the race in tearful humiliation long ago.
Not Rick, he is stubborn in the fashion of a determined teachable, whose inexplicable and foolish willfulness is divine compensation for being born into this uncaring life.

Newt Gingrich

is calling Ron Paul an "extremist", or words to that effect.

Which is akin to Benito Mussolini calling Generalissimo Francisco Franco a "fascist pig".

Ah but two short weeks ago, Newt was trying to "Run a Campaign of Ideas" now wasn't he?

It seems to me that

if Mitt Romney carries the day next month, it is less because of his particular tactics this year and more a function of the fact that his rivals for the GOP nomination are a matchless collection of ass clowns and raving twits.
They have all had their two to six week stint as the "AntiMitt" du jour and each and every one of them have been undone by the same thing, a pronounced tendency to say whatever outrageous thing flits thru their tiny little heads all of it on the record going back a decade.
Shee-it I could beat this rabble and I'm a democrat.
Still, one thing this process has done, is that it has inexorably, and predicably, moved Mitt Romney to right just as it did in 2008.  Count on it, a  few right hooks to that glass chin of his and Mitt turns into Bourke Hickenlooper every time. Why, a mere six months ago, Mitt was running as the sensible moderate "The Grown Up" in this race and as of this weekend he has come out as a slayer of social security and a libertarian "simplifier" of gummint.
Likely though, if Romney loses next month, he'll drop this android campaign plan and simply go berserk like he did in Michigan in 2008.

The one thing on which you can rely with Mitt Romney is that he remains a hopeless amateur...

And a Very Merry Christmas to...

Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul and Donald Trump and Rick "High Pitched Rich" Santorum and Former State Senator Scott Brown and Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and Gary Johnson and Buddy Roemer and Rick Perry and Charlie Baker and all that lot.
Oh and all my friends in the local punditariat...Happy Holidays to All!

Cuz without you-all, I haven't got a blog!!


I mean shit, I'd have to go back to writing about What Is On Television Tonight, a perfectly dreadful notion in every way!

When Scott Brown is down in the polls

he seamlessly morphs into this gurgling limp wristed Joe Lieberman moderate, desperately worried about po' folks and th' welfare 'o women & chillun' everywhar.

When he is up in the polls he is the very Whore of Wall Street and Mitch McConnell's Bitch in particular....Flushed with Cash like successful streetwalker at dawn.

Remember that, as this senate campaign unfolds.

I dunno about you - all...

but I think Mitt Romney's Augustan Refusal to release his income tax return ought to be at least as big an issue as President Obama's god-damned birth certificate. 

But of course, it won't....Not with Culture Jammers like this mook on the job.

Ah Brent Bozell, class all the way, proof positive that a pedigree with the National Review is no guarantor of decorum, you know that stuff jerks like him are always demanding from liberals.

Newt Gingrich doesn't want

America to "be like Massachusetts".


Hatin' on the Commonwealth, it must be close to the New Hampshire GOP Presidential Primary....typical.

Well, Humble Elias stands foursquare for the glories of Massachusetts! Our relatively low unemployment rate (seven percent or so last I checked) allows this state to absorb ghod knows how many workers from jobless recession wracked New Hampshire...If you don't believe me, take a drive thru the parking garage at Alewife Station and count all the "Live Free or Die"license plates.
You'd think Gingrich wouldn't be so churlish as to criticize the source of many a Granite State paycheck after all....

In Memoriam, C.H.

Let the record show, that in the end, the Late Christopher Hitchens' life stood as a monument to the notion that onetime fervent Trotskyites, make the worst conservatives.
Arrogant, authoritarian, treacherous, obsequious to those above, and insolent to those below him, Hitch came to America in search of a civilization to defend, he'd say anything to anyone to save us all from the Saracen Hordes or Hilary Clinton or whatever.
He stabbed his then friend Sidney Blumenthal in the back in a vain effort to get at Bill Clinton (whom he hated with tedious predicability). Hitch legitimized Leftish Clinton hatred to such a degree he gave more than a few Beltway republicans the erroneous notion that they had limitless room to maneuver in the lead up to the President's spurious impeachment.
Then of course, he made a seamless transition to post 9-11 war hawkery a pose that made him ubiquitous on cable television and beyond.
Yes, I know, Hitch was a out and proud atheist. So is Bill Maher so was Ayn Rand, in America apostasy and unbelief can be a revenue stream if you position yourself right.
And lord knows with his war whoopery and snarkery, Chris Hitchens lived and died a well positioned brand forward public intellectual...that is to say a miserable two faced wretch of the highest order.
If there is any justice in the after life, George Orwell is working over Hitchens right now with a sock full of wet sand.

Jon Huntsman's current round of campaign commercials

up in NH has this wonderful whiny quality to them. "I'm the REAL CONSERVATIVE!! Why Not Meeeee as the Anti-Mitt? It's My Turn to Make the Cover of Newsweek!!!"
Check em' out quick because I strongly doubt Huntsman will last until Martin Luther King Day at the rate he is going.
Seriously, a Mormon can't be the Anti-Mitt...ain't gonna happen, I hate to traffick in such rough sentiments but it is the truth. Ron Paul or Buddy Roemer have a better shot at this point.
Frankly for serious connoiseurs of desperate hubris, the New Hampshire Primary has always been a feast and a banquet going back to the days when Wilbur Mills was staggering from door to door.

Kim Jong Il, the Supreme Monocrat of North Korea

is dead.

One of the abiding strengths of Marxism Leninism is what Leonid Brezhnev called "Stability of Cadres", the party's ability to replenish itself via recruitment and self selection. However one of the great weaknesses of "Stability of Cadres" is that it all comes down sooner or later to the medieval concept of Primogeniture.

North Korea, case in point....Where Kim Jong Il is duly supplanted by his youngest son Kim Jong Un, age 28.

That makes the third generation of the Kim family to rule North Korea like a ramshackle plantation.

Well, you know what they say, from Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in just three generations.

 

I am given to think that

the GOP base dislikes Mitt Romney so very very much that they will vote for Barack Obama to spite the former Massachusetts Governor.
I mean why not?
They've countenanced far more dubious Anti-Mitts this past year, From Michelle Bachmann who is as batty as Dracula's Castle (and proud of it) to cheap Babbitish philander Herman Cain.
Right now, they are in turn, conjuring with Newt Gingrich's candidacy (whose pugnacious bluster neatly covers up the suspicion he'd shit himself loudly if he ever heard a shot fired in anger) and waiting in the wings shooting his cuffs, Ron Paul a libertarian mystic who nonetheless believes in the sanctity of the womb and the right of revealed religion to dictate terms to a free people.
Given all this mishaugas, the problem for Romney is that problem isn't going away even if he somehow cinches the nomination early and decisively.
I doubt any of these useless dingbats have the sheer guts to bolt and form a third partei (though we will hear lots of palaver about that from the punditariat over the short term believe me) but they can hang on mutter whine and curse which devalues the nomination as time goes on.
At which point, Barack start looking pretty good to all sorts of divergent cohorts...who can tell?

Newt Gingrich wants to arrest Federal Judges

who actively defy his ideological agenda should he become President.

Why stop there Newt?
Why not arrest congresspersons who obstruct your agenda, shit for that fact you could jail the portion of the electorate that did not vote for you?
But I snark, in the arid pseudo intellectual mind of the Former Speaker, one literally does not vote for candidates, one empowers via voting an entire ideology to Total Power....And lets not quibble about divorces or gays or gamey conservative payola.
***
Now...There is one observation I'd like to make here, and that is, Newt Gingrich is not anti-judiciary by nature and more than he was ant-executive when he screamed up impeachment against Bill Clinton.
What Newt opposes violently, is anything that impedes conservatives Right to Rule. Now if that means wrecking the separation of powers and creating a despotism in the process, he is fine with it so long as it is a conservative despotism.
You have to read a lot of books, immerse yourself in political science for years on end and think a great deal to come up with a public philosophy that destructive to liberty.
So much for the scholar in politics eh?

If there is a God of

Mercy and Irony and Justice in Heaven Above, then the late atheist Christopher Hitchens is arraigned before a robed & bearded Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, even as I write this....

And just possibly, George Orwell will be waiting for him with a pipewrench in hand to prove once and for all, who was really the conscience of Western Civilization. My money is on Orwell, those Spanish Civil War vets play fer keeps.

The New Hampshire Primary

and beyond it the GOP Presidential stakes, is rapidly becoming the political equivalent of a Trencherman's Feast, I hardly know what delicacy to sample first.
Lets start with Newt Gingrich a nasty  greedy foul mouthed distempered pseudo hack who can trill on and on about "running a campaign of ideas", just as soon has he is done comparing the competition to Adolf Eichmann.
The notion that Newt (that sophomore's sophomore) can somehow reconfigure himself into a nice scholarly  unthreatening Wingnut Woodrow Wilson has Humble Elias in stitches.
That is not how he became Speaker of the House kids...count on it.
But then, in Mitt Romney, Gingrich has the almost perfect assymetrical opponent, smarmy, disengaged, toxically wealthy and passive aggressive to a fault.
If indeed Gingrich can bootstrap himself into the "AntiMitt" position then the emerging debate between these two vain cowardly shrewd and ambitious men will be extremely interesting to watch.
Or who knows, maybe Ron Paul can sneak into the money? The man is a 21st century Robespierre in every sense of the word, unlike Newt and Mitt, Ron really believes his own bullshit  a "Man must be forced to fit the plan" type if ever there was one.
I'm telling you, this is the greatest political show on earth, and sadly for personal reasons, Humble Elias can't seem to disengage to get up to NH to see any of it.
Irony, I hate it .

Congrats to Will Brownsberger

who has won the democratic nomination for State Senate in the Second Suffolk District in a special election yesterday. I've seen Will around Arlington for some time now in his capacity as Belmont's state representative (also has few Arlington precincts in his district doncha know). He is a honest man and will do well in the State Senate.
And of course, thanks to the Primate Research Center we call the Joint House Senate Redistricting Committee, my precinct in sacred inviolate Menotomy, is about to be grafted onto Will Brownsberger's old House District (largely dominated by Belmont, shitty roads and all).
So I have a front row seat (albeit on the wrong side of Route Two) on the race to replace Brownsberger in the House...Too bad I don't know squat about Belmont politics or personalities.
Yeah it is nice starting from the bottom again, thanks again to the trained anthropoids in the lege, this and casino gambling are your legacies in this session, sheer genius in both cases.

Radio Tyrant Michael Savage....

(who is as crazy as a shit house rat) has publicly offered Newt Gingrich One Million Dollars to get out of the GOP Presidential Race.
Shit Newt can make that kind of dough in an hour peddling his ass on K-Street, chump change is what that is.
However I do wanna take a moment to accuse Michael Savage of plagiarism of the lowest kind. Scroll back to the summer of 2003 or so, and you will find a Chimes at Midnight posting idly joking about how much bribery money it would cost the US taxpayer to get George Bush Jr. to resign the Presidency.
It was a joke!
But Michael Savage, having no sense of humor and no creativity proposes to enact it for real with Newt Gingrich....goddamn goniff!
Well who is Michael Savage backing anyway? Galleazzo Ciano? General Quiepo De Llano? Admiral Yamamoto?
The mind reels...

Tom Conroy has

bailed out from the democratic US Senate Primary, and endorsed Citizen Warren.

So much for Humble Elias' naive' hopes of a full and complete debate arising from said primary eh?
Money is voting early and voting often and long before the polls actually open as well...Hence Conroy couldn't compete and thus he graciously benched himself alongside Khazei and Setti Warren etc etc.
One of the things I truly detest about the current fundraising & campaign finance environment is that the flow of money, can very easily stifle debate. And that is exactly what is happening here, although to my own discredit I should have seen it coming.
That is not a rap on Citizen Warren, under the circumstances she cannot be upbraided for "seein' her opportunities and takin' em", but if we want free and fair debate, it starts with reappraising the centrality of money to the electoral process.

Forget his statesman/frontrunner pose...

Gimme the old Mitt Romney any day of the week, callow, cowardly, amateurish, desperate to win and conniving endlessly in an inept sort of way.
Like quoting off of Ann Coulter to put himself to the right of Newt Gingrich...I mean that is the Old Mitt Romney, you can smell the flopsweat a half mile away.
But that is Romney in a nutshell, the race tightens and he starts panicking and throwing clumsy haymakers, $10k bets with the semi-mongoloid Governor of Texas and then harvesting clips from Ann Coulter...and ghod knows what else before all is said and done.
Can't wait, this is the best show in town, Romney in the final weeks before a primary a clown show to put Emmett Kelly to shame.

So MItt Romney

tried to bet Rick Perry $10K that he'd never ever ever been FOR an individual healthcare mandate, before he was against it?
Honestly, is it good politics for Mitt Romney to publicly offer a big money bond on his own craven sense of opportunism?
And what kills me about this mishaugas is that Perry did the first smart thing in the last twenty years of his life, he turned down the wager.
It won't be enough to save Perry's candidacy at this point, but it will keep him out of the Texas School for Incorrigible Teachables after he bails.
This is Romney at his ugliest, flinging his money around with heedless arrogance and offering bets on subjects about which he ought to dummy up.
Amateur...there is no other word for Willard Mitt Romney.

How come I'm the last to know

That Donald Trump is thinking about running as an Independent Candidate for President next year??
The only thing that could beat for sheer hilarity this would be if Pat Paulsen rose from the dead and ran as a Vegetarian or maybe a Whig.
Still Trump is basically kidding us, he lacks the guts and the focus to run, he likes the attention his bluster gets nothing more, anyway who'd he pick for veep...Gary Busey?

If Donald Trump

can moderate a GOP Debate in Iowa, then why can't Bill Maher do likewise and the same?

Or Howard Stern for that fact?

Bill Maher is much smarter and funnier than Donald Trump, he has for example actually read the US Constitution and can relate that quaint imperiled document to today's radical conservative with ease.

Howard Stern on the other hand is much better interviewer than either Trump or Maher, put him at the moderator's table and nothing will be moderated, but we will find stuff out believe me.

To put it bluntly, Donald Trump is as thick as a brick, despite the entertainment value of his gaudy mono-mania, the only topic he can talk about authoritatively is himself, thus The Donald is a bad choice as a debate host.

Well from the looks of things, even the sky grifters and shifty mooks that comprise the GOP Field get that, thus the debate ranks are looking mighty thin. My guess is the debate itself will be cancelled before noon today.

And Romney was right to turn it down, the Former Viceroy is exactly the sort of handsome credulous fool who gets fired first on "The Apprentice".

According to the Boston Herald

Citizen Elizabeth Warren has opened up a seven point lead over Former State Senator Scott Brown, 49% to 42%.
Yipes bad news for Team Brown given that the general election is almost eleven months away.
But therein lies my admonition for the day, the election is eleven months away, the democratic primary isn't until September 2012 and a lot will happen between now and then.  Moreover, forty nine percent is a plurality not a majority, those numbers are bound to change once the media scrutiny heats up....Hell Joanie Vennochi has not yet begun to cast a pox on both their houses yet.
The most important thing to remember is that seven point deficit potentially puts Brown in UnderDog Status, which is his preferred position, an UnderDog with a seven million dollar warchest all shaken down from the elite of Wall Street.

TR

"The constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make good that promise good. But it does not grant the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth".

Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Y'know,

the Brian McGrory's of this world will go sighing into the night, insisting that this time, Mitt Romney is at peace with his "Legacy As Governor of Massachusetts".
But then news like this comes thru, to the effect that the Former Viceroy spent 100K scrubbing state databases of emails and other important indicators that his governorship really was in Massachusetts after all.
It is a popular cliche' out there, that Mitt Romney has no soul, no core beliefs, at least he cares not to share any of it with the voters.
Humble Elias though, thinks this is a misapprehension. Romney does have a very deeply held core belief, his actions above and his public statements proclaim it unambiguously.
And that is, Mitt Romney firmly believes with religious conviction that if he had been elected Governor of Colorado or Utah or Michigan or New Hampshire (all states where I think he owns property) he'd be President by now.
To an outside observer, that is a remarkably cynical notion, but given Romney's almighty opportunism, it is the local conclusion in every way.

At this point...

a motley collection of bohos, progressive activists, borderline "scientific socialists, anarchists and greying folksingers, the core of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement would seem to be the only cohort out there desperately trying to save the middle class in the USA.
The irony is killing me fuh sherrr.
During the prior prosperity, wealth was transferred to the top 2% from the Middle Class, to keep up debt was incurred, second and third mortgages rung up on residential properties.
Then the crash, credit got cut off, but the transfer of wealth continued unabated.
For better or worse the "Occupy Movement" stands athwart that process and cries "HALT!"
Why do they come to the defense of the "Babbit Bourgeoisie"?
Because for better or worse they've read enough history to realize that no democracy has ever survived without an economically healthy and politically engaged middle class.
If Mom and Dad lose their ranch house in Fort Myers Beach, it can't long before Seth loses his artist's loft by the Merrimack in Lowell.
It is as simple as that, the issues that the Occupiers are trafficking in are life and death for the American Middle Class, the politician who gets that, can ride to glory in 2012.

Jeff Jacoby adopts a prim

sorrowful tone in today's Boston Globe column with respect to Congressman Frank's alleged tart tongue.
No doubt Barney will make Jeff's phony-ass end of the year "Liberal Hate Speech" list in 2011.
Not for nothing but when FM 96.9's Michael Graham goes into one of his paranoid Muslim eliminationist frenzies, where is Jeff's sorrowful clucking tone?
Just curious...

Herman we hardly knew ye...

A month or so after Newsweek put him on the cover and dubbed him a serious contender for the GOP Presidential nomination, Herman Cain (awash in The sort of bimbo eruptions that would gratify a Mary Matalin) bails out of the race.
As the GOP field goes forward, Herman Cain will be remembered as someone who kept up such a shrieking din of tax crackpottery as to drown out any sensible discussion of the issue to the point of suppressing even the use of the "indoor voice".
Keep that in mind next summer when the republican national convention has to debate tax policy, if it all degenerates into a race to say the stupidest and craziest things, recall please what sort of candidates got all the attention & enthusiam in the previous winter.

If Cain is really bailing tomorrow

per this news item, I wonder how much his endorsement is worth?
I'm guessing, based on the specific nature of the allegations, it ain't worth much, but for purposes of building momentum and comity, it might be a nice "get" for Newt Gingrich.
Don't see how Romney is in position to grab it off...but I could be wrong.
MiGhod, a mere month ago, Cain was a front runner in some polls, the Rising Man of the Hour.
Now look at him, a busted clown with a bad taste for alleged bimbos.

Oh well we live in an era of "instant candidacies" and the downside is that you plunge as fast as you rise.

Waaaal I swan....

But the Boston Globe reports that Citizen Elizabeth Warren has pulled even with Former State Senator Scott Brown in the current round of polling.
This is after a round of crudely executed attack ads from "Brand Brown" and a series of introductory adverts from Citizen Warren's campaign.
Right now, Scott is campaigning exactly like a swollen headed rube who got himself slapped awake forcefully. He hasn't figured out how to come to grips with the challenge, but that won't last.
Warren on the other hand has made a decent impression on the basis of a few commercials and a round of coffee klatsches, likewise that won't last either.
And no one has started campaigning for real yet, huge blogging opportunities, a race for the ages, it'll make Weld-Kerry look like one of Senator Claghorn's stumblebum runs.
Of course, there are "feints within feints" here (to quote the late Frank Herbert), if Brown fades to black on election night, this might put a premium on getting a Republican elected governor in 2014 to "balance out" the state's alleged democratic tilt.
Advantage...Charlie Baker (who by all accounts wants another crack at...something)
On the other hand, Martha Coakley (currently suing the Money Changers in the Temple, the Gospel of Matthew is now "exhibit A" in the people's lawsuit) might construe vindication from a Warren victory and go staggering off on the campaing trail trying to grab off the Governorship.
So a lot of things are riding on this senate race...starting with an unending stream of "sarcastic rant driven chatter" from yours truly, Humble Elias Nugator.

Kultur Note

"Robots" are running amok in Davis Square tomorrow night...