Jingle Money Rises from the Dead...

The Boston Sunday Globe breathlessly reports on the front page, that former Governor Jane "Jingle Money" Swift is quietly refurbishing her political network at looks to new races, like maybe another try at congress should John Olver retire.
Well...fine, except this is old news in Western Mass, I can recall reading news stories in the Berkshire Eagle on Jane's cautious efforts to get back into the game as far back as August 2003!
All this indicates is that it takes a full FOUR YEARS for a good story to make it's way out of North Adams out to Morrissey Boulevard.
However, Jane is a spent force in state politics I think...she may want vindication but the time for that was in 2002 when she was beset upon by Crazy Christy Mihos and Mitt Romney. Instead she tearfully surrendered without a fight and handed the state over to an absentee landlord with strange delusions of grandeur. The lady doesn't have much in the way of a fighting record to share with the voters in that district.

Romney is wooing evangelical voters

so reports the Boston Globe. Six months of dedicated cringing and groveling has achieved naught but the enlightened indifference of Dr. James Dobson Dean of the Book Worshipper's political wing. To Romney whose ambition is heavly freighted with low expectations of himself, this trumpeted as a huge victory, proof of his "momentum".
It'd be instructive though to note just what Romney did for the evangelicals of Massachusetts back when he was Governor...which was just exactly nothing from where Humble Elias sits.
And if they are fool enough to vote for him next year, then that is what they will get in abundance, nothing....just between you me and the fencepost.

I'm glad to see that Rudy Giuliani is coming in for

some of the clerical criticism that once dogged Candidate John Kerry circa 2004.

Gotta hand it to the R.C.C., they traffic with none of this "big tent" rubbish they unload on any catholic who departs from the pro-life line regardless of their party registration.

John Hancock CEO Dominic D'Alessandro

in a guest editorial in the Boston Globe comes out swinging for moving up the Massachusetts Presidential Primary to a more competitive date.
Fair enough, this was pretty much a market driven argument to "up-brand" our presidential primary and aggressively pursue a more advantageous calendar position in the schedule.
However, Mr. D'Alessandro fails to note a powerful indirect influence Massachusetts has over the New Hampshire primary being as we are an important source of campaign volunteers for both parties.
Hell, it was Bay State volunteers that kept John Kerry competitive back in the bleak December of 2003...so he can't argue that we play no role, it is just that our primary doesn't count for much.
The problem here is, out of fifty states, is always it necessary that there be one single and only first primary? New Hampshire has had the sinecure for over fifty years now and the whole mishaugas has degenerated into a peculiar local cottage industry. If we really wanted to make the primary process fair and democratic we ought change over to a system of five sequenced regional primaries or else randomly choose the first five or so primaries and leave the rest of the present schedule in place.
The present system is in need of reform owing to the front end clustering of primaries that over advantage early money & momentum at the expense of making a reasoned choice by the electorate.

Oh this is a riot...

Richard Viguerie is still hyping the notion of an ultra conservative third party challenge in '08 as a response to a Giuliani nomination.
Viguerie is the biggest and most predictable drama queen in the GOP, he goes into the same conniptions every election cycle ominously promising a third party if the GOP sways even slightly from conservative orthodoxy. The reality is, conservatives control the GOP nomination, there hasn't been a notable conservative based third party since George Wallace's rebel yell style American Independent Party in 1968. This is why Giuliani keeps surrendering his allegedly moderate GOP principles on a weekly basis, he knows movement conservatives control the GOP nomination and they must be placated. If he gets the nomination he may well go in for full immersion baptism in Goose Creek...he'll come up from the waters blubbering "Praise the Lord and cancel all abortions!" count on it.
As for Viguerie, he is a hack and blowhard...nothing will come of his threats.

Meanwhile...

Channel Zero celebrates the day by indulging in outright comic fabrication.

Happy Sputnik Day...

today's marks the fiftieth anniversary of the launching of the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1.
As this was a Russian achievement, America went suitably apeshit with cold war paranoia, convinced that we'd just lost the containment game in the ninth inning and that Soviet hydrogen bombs were about to rain down us like autumn acorns.
Only time proved the groundlessness of those fears...so remember that the next time Mike Huckabee or John McCain start ranting and raving about the monumental nature of the terrorist threat.