Jindal Bells:Taking sides in the GOP stupidity crises

Bobby Jindal, a potential Republican presidential  candidate in 2016, thinks his party should stop being stupid. That's what  he told the slamfest of the Republican Natiional Committee meeting in Charlotte. "We've got to stop being the stupid party,"  is what he asserted to his stupid audience as the keynote speaker.

His words so stupified some of the stupid committeemen that a couple of them met later over  pitchers  of empowering Gatorade and declared Jindal as being stupid for calling them stupid in his stupid  version of Jindal Bells.

Indeed, one of the members' wives, who tagged along to carry her stupid husband's luggage, even thought it was inappropriate for the stupid Louisiana governor to ruin a nice break from the routine to take some stupid tours of Charlotte - all underwritten by the host city.

One delegate even confronted Jindal, eyeball to eyeball, and blurted:  "You're stupid!'

To which Jindal replied, "No, sir, you're stupid!"

"No,  you're stupid, governor!"

That playground exchange lasted a good 20 minutes  before they thought it would help if they took a break from the hostilities to  slip over to the Gatorade bar for a stupid nightcap. (Real men actually need Gatorade as a cheap high for their testosterone.)

Frankly, we don't know what the fuss is all about.  Two of the party's deepest thinkers tried to rally them with good news.  George Will , who is best remembered for his stupid TV prediction that Romney would win in a landslide, assured stupid Republicans that President Obama's inaugural speech was nothing more than stupid "rhetorical cotton candy - sugary and mostly air''. Conservatism, he argued,. is alive and well - no matter the polls that show Obama and Americans aligned on major issues.

Paul Ryan, the stupid vice presidential loser, was once again upbeat, scrubbing pots and pans that had already been scrubbed, and  declaring that if given half a chance, stupid Republicans will show they can govern despite the stupid outcome of the November election.

When last seen, all of the stupid  committeemen went out and cracked open another keg of Gatorade.

Even Mitt Romney stupidly declared elsewhere that he will be back.

Moral:  Stupid is as stupid does.  Did we really need   Bobby Jindal to tell us that?



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Today's GOP: a group of leaderless old white guys

The Obama Inaugural festivities are now over and the reviews are in.  While many national pundits  parse every sentence in the president's rousing speech, one thing is certain:  For the grim Republicans and their fellow-snivelers, there is no joy in Mudville.  The Grand Old Party  is neither grand nor a party.  It is rather a chaotic collection of old white guys in vain search of a leader.    Twice defeated by an African-American Democrat  - the latest by  5 million votes! - who has deftly connected with a new generation of voters,  woebegone Republicans have only a beleaguered John Boehner to try to put his House in order in a cave teeming with Tea Partyers.  

Still, there is no evidence that Obama's opponents have learned anything  as they whimper that the "foxy"  Obama  must come out of the chicken coop to meet them halfway in solving the nation's problems.  Of all things, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is demanding compromise - a word that collides with his notorious  earlier mission for his routed party after Obama's first victory:

"The single most important  thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president"

The quote even made page 190 of the Mann-Ornstein best- seller, It's Even Worse than It Looks.  And that was published before  the 2012 election. Can anyone now guess what Mitch's second most important thing is?

Their  post-inaugural chorus was filled out by many of the usual tattered suspects complaining about the usual irritants that guaranteed them a shot at the usual TV cameras.  Sens. McCain and Graham, a couple of tiresome cronies  from past debacles, expressed their displeasure, to name a few.  And Wayne LaPierre, the NRA megaphone, pathetic as he is, isn't going to let anybody forget that tyrannical government is at the doorstep and you can only be saved by even arming department store mannequins.   Fox News, Rush Limbaugh  and the Tea Partyers were heaped among the vanquished.

These folks will never change.   Their work is too profitable. And as  Tennessee Ernie Ford used to sing: They owe their soul to the company store.

They could only deal in playground dares as Obama reeled off his agenda that was immediately described as liberal but dealt with ideas and programs that a majority of Americans support. It's now OK to mention liberalism in polite circles. And about time! 

There was another aspect of the Inaugural that was lost in the excitement:  Mitt Romney's absence from the historic  event.  Few people asked, and most couldn't care less.  Where  was he? We learned that he was at home in California.

Watching the parade as a broadly-grinning Obama waved and Joe Biden sprinted here and there,  I tried to imagine what the scene would have been if Romney and Paul Ryan had won.  It would have been a dreadful setback for a nation whose people would have been  so well ahead of its new team: a presidential  candidate of whom his son asserted never wanted  the job anyway, and a vice president who is a disciple of Ayn Rand. Neither Mitt nor his Tonto had much to say about the dramatic change underway in America because they didn't recognize it.

 To the vanquished go the snivels. And why not?  It's the only thing that seems to make the losers happy these days.

A Stark reality: Mitt didn't reimburse either

Recalling the fuss that a Beacon Journal columnist made over  the costs of President Obama'a campaign stop in the  Akron area  that  fell into the laps of local taxpayers, it only seems fair to refer to an article in the Canton Repository that told of a similar free ride by Mitt Romney for his rally at Hoover High school on Oct. 26.

The paper reported that local requests by  Canton  and Stark County for reimbursement of $l4,500 have been rejected by Team Romney.  An additional $600 bill for Paul Ryan's visit to North Canton wasn't paid.  Mayor David Held said he s was "disappointed".

Probably not as much as all of the Republicans in Stark County who voted for Mitt , a Red County that supported him in a losing cause.

More leftovers - and those diehard Republicans

 

How well this banner describes the Republicans' preoccupation with women's personal choices instead of unemployment and other economic matters.  These women were engaged in a protest in Columbus where a legislative committee was considering a bill to ban public money from  going to Planned Parenthood.  Being  Republicans-tilted, the committee ignored  the protest and voted 11-9 along strict party lines to send the bill to the House floor for further consideration and a vote.  News of President Obama's election that gave him the edge on social issues had apparently not found its way into the GOP cave in Columbus.

                                                                 * * * * *

Speaking of issues, how did Paul Ryan arrive at the conclusion that during the campaign his side was talking about the "popular" issues (i.e., the ones supported by the voters, I guess)?  Ryan also scoffs that Obama won a mandate from the voters because the House of Representatives remains in Republican hands.   That overlooks the math that told us a majority of America's voters supported Democratic congressional candidates, but gerrymandering  remained the decisive factor in electing Republicans. Case in point:  Although the president carried Ohio, Republicans won 12 of the 16 congressional districts.  Go figure.

                                                                 * * * * *

Let's stop talking about "mandates" - fuzzy references to the width of a winner's margin to carry out his or her plans.   A wise old politician once told me he didn't have much interest in mandates.  Rather, he said, a true leader looks at a situation and simply says to himself, "I gotta do what I gotta do".  Makes sense to me.

                                                               * * * * *

In case you felt overwhelmed by all of those TV political ads, there was a reason:  The New York Times reported 1.4 million ads were aired, estimated cost: $952 million.

                                                              * * * * *
Biggest  losers in Ohio were Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted and Atty Gen. Mike DeWine, both of whom traveled down dark paths by mistakenly ignoring  the potency of  those voters who had been  profiled  to lose .   DeWine  worked with Husted in trying to shrink the vote.  And U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus assailed Husted's late-campaign directive   to further alter the vote , declaring  it was "surreptitious" and a"flagrant violation of a state election law." Clear enough?

* * * * *
My column on Jon Husted's lashing by a federal judge and the GOP attacks on Planned Parenthood has been posted on Plunderbund
  

With Ryan, the soup kitchen's brass got hot

How do you turn photo-ops into photo oops?  

Paul Ryan learned the hard way when he posed as a soup kitchen pot scrubber  in Youngstown the past week end.  It was so...um... humanizing for a vice presidential candidate to take time out from his busy schedule to don an apron in  the dining hall of St. Vincent de Paul to wash some pots whether they needed it or not.

It was clearly a political act  that backfired on any ideas that Ryan might have had about showing his affinity with the day jobs of ordinary folks.

From the Youngstown Vindicator, we are  told of the backlash from the intrusion into the lives of kitchen crews:

"The president of Mahoning County's St. Vincent de Paul  Society is 'shocked' and 'angry'  that Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan used the soup kitchen for a 'publicity stunt.'

"Bryan J. Antal, who runs the society said the campaign 'ramrodded themselves in there without getting proper permission for the visit."

The dining hall's coordinator, Juanita Sherba, said she had agreed at first to the visit, but now realizes it was a "mistake".

Shucks, the Ryan people said, the candidate simply wanted to call attention to the "Meaningful charitable contributions the St. Vincent de Paul Society makes to people in need."

And I might add, will have to do so with still greater effort if the brutal Ryan budget ever settles into our simple workaday lives..

On Planet Romney, multi-choice percentages

We arrived at debate day tuckered out by the political gurus telling Obama and Romney what they "absolutely" must do to stave off Armageddon.    Some, in the case of Newt Gingrich, offered a multi-choice  list for Mitt.  Donald Trump was more bumper-stickerish:  Hit the president with the old birtherismo. Sarah Palin chipped in daring Mitt to be a determined magnum force..

As much as the pundits would have you believe, none of this amounts to anything more than self-absorbed navel gazing and will surely be ignored by the inner-circles before their last meals.

Obama has repeatedly said he is president of 100 pct.of the people. But it's a bit blurrier  in the enemy camp.  Mitt says 47 pct. is a solid number to describe the moochers in America that he can't worry about.

Ryan, however, scaled that down to 30 pct. without telling us what happened to the 17 pct. he stripped from Mitt's figure.  (It would probably take too much time.)

But hold it right  there .  Mitt said in Florida this week that he wants to represent 100 pct. of the people, which is 53 pct.  more than his earlier dismissal of the folks that he says live entirely off the government with no get-up-ad-go.

("My job ," he once harshly explained, "is not to worry about those people.")

Stand by, as we await a pollster to give us a  composite of Mitt's percentage averages, which, history tells us, would not come close to 100 pct.

In fairness, why not 3 hours for Ryan to explain tax plan?

I would like to begin the week by offering my thanks to Mitt Romney for choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate.   Even though most of us are suffering from fatigue from the numbing  drone of the campaign, Ryan does invite  our attention with wit, intrigue and irony. In his most  recent appearance on Fox News, which is where  the Comeback to Bush Team goes to have its gas tank filled, Ryan spun a question from host Chris Wallace, who asked for the math on how the Romney tax plan would remain revenue-neutral while cutting taxes.

Ryan was ready for it:   "I don't have the..It would take me too long to go through all of the math."

That item was posted by the Huffington Post  in a list of "most popular" notes telling us that Justin Bieber puked on stage;  a magazine ran a photo of Kate Middleton bottomless; and Arnie  Schwarzenegger admitted to an affair with Brigitte Nielsen.

That's pretty strong competition, don't you think, but Ryan proved to be worthy of the challenge.

Universal questions of the millennium

I have questions:

• As the Republican presidential campaigns shambles toward Election Day,  when will good soldier John Boehner crack and start sobbing on TV?
• 
  
• Who will convince  Mitt Romney that the  presidency is  not an  entitlement?
• 
  
• Who will respond to comedian Lewis Black's appeal for someone to make his bathroom as white as the GOP convention that he viewed?
• 
  
• When a Romney strategist asserted that Mitt would Etch-a-Sketch after the primaries, was he referring to the 2016 primaries?
• 
  
• Would it at least help the economy with job creation if  the government made silver  spoons for  the  47 pct. of Americans whom he says won't take responsibilitiy for themselves?
• 
  
• Would you join an office pool  to predict the day when Rep. Darrell Issa will say something intelligent?
• 
  
• Will Josh Mandel ,  the Republican candidate for the senate,  tell us whether he was really   stationed in the Green Zone in Iraq.
• 
  
• When will Paul Ryan stop referring to Romney as his "running mate"?
•       
• Why won't the media ask Paul Ryan about the time he saw the North Pole from his front porch?
• 
  
• Am I the only person who doesn't  think Comedian Dennis Miller is funny?
• 
  
• When will Rush Limbaugh refer to all women as sluts?
• 
  
• How many wives is Mitt Romney permitted to have? 
• 
  
• Finally, will Mitt add an elevator for his dancing horses to his palatial home?  
• 
  
• And finally again: Wouldn't Mitt's life be a lot less complicated if he let H&R  Block  do his taxes?    

•     

Ryan enters race in the outside lane

And now, Dear Reader. do we have a 3-man race:  Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and...um...Paul Ryan?

On at least two occasions, Ryan has said he disagrees with Romney's  version of the 47 per centers...Or...that Mitt's remarks were "inarticulate".

Latest polls among diehard Republicans between Mitt and Paul  now give Ryan 37 pct., Romney 26 pct., with the others undecided or still at the seashore. When Ryan's  boss, who has been out to a long lunch, returns to the office,  heads could roll.

Today's political news: The view from the rear

What a week, huh? The thundering herd was on the move - backward.  The photo will give you a strong sense of it.  We scooped up a few bits of evidence to close out the week.  Here I go  again:

Romney foreign policy advisor  Richard Wiilliamson  was quoted in the Washington Post as saying the  Middle East would be a kinder, gentler place if Mitt were president.   "There's a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you'd be in a different situation,"  he said, explaining that  Muslims would have liked him much more than Obama.  I'm not sure what to make of that so I'll move on.

Paul Ryan, who has referred to Mitt as his running mate,  says that when Obama talks about  pulling together to improve  America, he's dishonest.  Why?   Yep, the president's  pro-choice position that "panders to the most extreme elements of his party."

Ryan, an absolutist who insists there should be no exceptions for abortion, said, "We're all in this together - it has a nice ring. For everyone who loves this country  it is not only true, but obvious. Yet how hollow it  sounds coming from a politician who has never once lifted a hand to defend the most helpless and innocent of all human beings, the child waiting to be born."

Plunderbund noted that Ohio Board of Education president Debe Terhar,   a Tea Party activist, has been named the co-chair of the Educators for Romney coalition, whatever that is.    Terhar was appointed to the board by Gov. Kasich, ostensibly to  bring enthusiasm and fervor to the state's education interests.  If this works out,  she'll doubtless be named as the football coach at one of the state universities.  But first she'll have to finish the laundry

 It could change, but as we write, those  efforts to remove Obama from the Kansas  ballot may have fizzled.  A Kansas man who petitioned the state to to deny him a spot on the ballot has withdrawn his petition within a few days before the Kansas Objections Board was to act on it.  The petitioner is a devout birther and had a friend in Secretary of State Kris Kobach,  likewise a birther who  was prepared to honor the request on grounds that Obama hadn't proved that he  was an American.
By the way, Kobach is  on the  Romney immigration advisory team. (It never ends with Mitt!)

What was that memorable line from the Wizard of Oz?  "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.")

Good.

Romney-Ryan Comeback Team heading for Bush Country, not Sorrento

It seems only fitting that my fascination with  the businessman running for president that I should respond belatedly  to the Republican convention  that brought us the  Comeback Team of Mitt and Paul.  (Sorry, Rick and Newt, Michelle and Sarah - maybe next time.)

Did I say Comeback Team?    I did.  It was on everybody's mind for this star-crazed moment of redemption in Tampa for the future of America, if not necessarily its middle class.
It nagged me that I had heard of comebacks before, the Hollywood version.  Turning to the Web, I learned The Comebacks was a satirical  movie produced in 2007  that parodied the "cliches and plots of of the sports film genre."

Where else would you find a character named Jizminder Featherfoot?  C'mon.  Let's be fair about this.  He wasn't the fellow with the 10-gallon hat sitting in the third row of the Texas delegation.  And there was nobody in the cast playing Clint Eastwood or Cardinal Dolan.

One Web source did provide us with a few quotes from the film to give you some idea of its level of comedy. It liked the exchange between Michelle Fields and Lance Truman, two of the film's characters:

Michelle:  I was out catching some waves.
Lance: In the middle of Texas?
Michelle:  I told you I'm hard-core.

Or the one between Lambeau "Coach" Fields  and God:

Lambeau:  Yeah,this is great.  Middle of Podunk, nowhere. How am I gonna find an All-American quarterback?
God: If you build it he will come.  If you build it, he will come.

(God also told Lambeau his father was dead, and wouldn't be around to build it but Lambeau corrected Him that his father was very much alive.   But that's another story.)

Since the movie, like the convention, got only tepid reviews, I leaned toward calling the Comeback Team the Soggy Bottom Boys from the ornery film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?   Or Willard and the Golden Fleece (job).

But there I go again, off the page. So I  think I'll b e content with calling it the Comeback to Bush Team.

Close enough.

When Mitt met Dirty Harry in Tampa version

AS THE TV cameras channeled the final night of the Republican convention into our home,    I remembered reading of Dean Martin's opening line for his show at the Sands in Las Vegas:

"Who are  all of you people and what are you doing in my room?"

Some thoughts:

Romney surprised nobody with his warm and fuzzy references to God, motherhood, America and, of course,  businessmen.   It was part John Wayne tough guy and part the caring small-town  preacher with no limit to his blessings.    It was the stuff of sermons for hawkish frontiersmen heading out to  dispatch  the horse thieves from the range. God and guy stuff.

Still, he lost me immediately with his description of  Paul Ryan that went: "He represents the best in America."

He said what?   Forgive me for asking,  is this the same Paul Ryan who was ripped from coast to coast for telling so many lies in his own speech?  I have a feeling that Ryan's recklessness with the truth will make him a high maintenance guy as the campaign  moves on in earnest.

 But the fellow who gave the benediction, Cardinal Dolan, doesn't mind.  He had said earlier that he found Ryan to be an "upright guy".  Even when he bears false witness?

And how about Mitt insisting that America "united" behind Obama when he was elected, hoping for a better America.  Who wrote that whopper in his speech?  Who ignored the truculent threats by the big guys in the GOP to block Obama from Day One on any  initiative  - which the Tea Party controlled House of Representatives and their parrots have done for four years.

My notes also show:    Romney attacks Obamacare without mentioning its predecessor,  Romneycare. In your face!

Turn now to the most pathetic appearance of the night: Clint Eastwood's embarrassing off the cuff drivel that stumbled, mumbled and struggled in a way that did no favors for guys his age (82).  This was Dirty Harry going after Obama.  You remember his Hollywood role of Dirty Harry Callahan, don't you?  He was the terrorizing cop who broke all of the rules of police work in nailing the bad guys.  I kept hoping that the lights would go out in the hall for a few seconds and when the place lit up again, Clint would have mercifully vanished - for his own good. It was an ugly scene in an arena where you can always make an allowance for a little goofiness. But not this.  My notes:  The delegates seem delighted.

Another note:    Why is Newt Gingrich still hanging around the action?  The media can't resist him, nor he, they. Alas, will we never see his promised permanent base on the moon in his "second term"?

Finally, back to Romney:  Would it be a kinder, gentler nation under him?   Morning in America?  Compassionately conservative?  Don't know about you, but even as cliches, none of them seemed to fit this orchestrated, tightly-strung mystery  candidate on this night.  He was simply the old Romney being the old Romney. Oh, and another thing in my scrawl: If there's so much out there against Obama's "failed" presidency,  why did Romney &  Co. make so many things up?

If you watched this spectacle of empty suits and a spent old incoherent Hollywood actor,  can you say that you are better off now than you were before it began?

Tonight's GOP convention sing-along

Let me close tonight's over-ripe outpouring of Republican convention speeches with a tribute to the Romney/Ryan ticket,   with some updated words from Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music":

Aren't they rich?
Aren 't they a pair?
They're at last on the ground,
Down from mid-air. 
Send in the clowns.

What is rape? The white guys seek official definition

In the current maelstrom over the abortion "debate," it's interesting to note how much of the expertise about women's bodies is  being issued in public places by white guys. We all know about Rep. Todd Akin's authoritative insights into what constitutes "legitimate rape"  and the Romney/Ryan camp's broken-field scampering to find an official  definition it could agree on.  (Ryan saved his side's  day by repeating President Obama's affirmation that "Rape is rape". Thank you.)

Over  in Pennsylvania, Rep. Tom Smith, Republican senate candidate, entered the linguistic lunacy marathon by taking the abortion issue to the next opaque level.  He opined that rape could be compared to "having a baby out of wedlock".  That may be a bigger challenge to the next white  guy who was planning to claim that rape  was a purely defensible act by men just being men.

Ryanakin, that's one way of putting it

I had planned to start the  the coverage of the GOP convention by offering Mitt  the edgy new name for Paul Ryan - Ryanoceros.  But since evidence grows regarding his long-standing relationship with Todd Akin's abortion views,  I think I now prefer Ryanakin, which is catchy even if it's stupid.   But if you consider the two guys it represents, who can honestly say that stupidity isn't involved here?

In Santorum visit, the thrill is gone

The old house across Market Street from the Tangier Restaurant was still sprouting one of  those 1950s rooftop TV antennas.  A few paces away a low-slung building was separated from the world by closed venetian blinds.  Its lettered message above the door  told of the availability of pinballs, pool tables, juke boxes and other once-wildly-popular diversions, although it wasn't immediately clear that the place was still open for business.  To one side facing the street rose a large sign promoting the 65th annual Italian-American Festival, July 13-July 15,  This was Aug. 15.

The Tangier marquee bore a welcome by "Romney-Ryan, Oh., for Senator R. Santorum.'"  But like the scene across the street,  there was an equally strong sense of yesterday  as the small crowd awaited the arrival of their honored guest in a room just off the lobby.    It was on Feb. 19 that Santorum, the darling of the Buckeye Tea Party, drew 1,350 well-wishers to the Summit County  Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner.  His supporters shunned Mitt Romney by anticipating a big Santorum sweep in Ohio.  As Bryan C. Williams, a veteran factotum in the local GOP and Tea Party admirer, put it, the event would "kind of cement his front-runner status in Ohio."  Besides, Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine had astonished many of his party's brethren by abandoning Romney's ship to endorse the former Pennsylvania senator.

But as anyone who has aspired to political greatness knows, you must first win the front-runner election, which didn't come close to happening, even as Santorum barked that Mitt was the "worst Republican" his party could nominate.

He didn't repeat that harsh assessment at the Tangier muted pep session.  He was even less demonstrative as he peered out at a standing audience of no more than 75 (!) listeners that included at  least a dozen dutiful local candidates who are never more than a phone call away from one of these events, reporters and Obama's own monitors.   Explaining that county GOP chairman Alex Arshinkoff would not be available (he was ailing), Williams worked to keep the program moving by introducing each local  with the party's trademark musical bump by a small  outfit that managed Stars and Stripes Forever with a guitar, electronic piano and drums, if you can imagine that.

Santorum revived his speeches from the primary season to a courteous group,  many wearing
Romney lapel stickers.   But he was less than connective as he assailed Obama as a lawbreaker, a warrior on religion  (got that, Catholics?) , and a divisive character who was in the game simply to collect votes.  "You have a right," he said, in his insistence on pulpiteering, "to live your faith out."  But his biggest applause line was his promise that the  Romney-Ryan campaign would go after the media. It's a standby promise, but it usually works with the right crowd.
''
On the whole he did seem less energized than the time he stood up  before the Lincoln Day dinner crowd.   But he had so many more listeners in February and considered himself the frontrunner.  Today he will merely be the supernumerary on the Romney-Ryan Comeback America Team.

Losers tend to draw much smaller crowds. And, likewise,  that Italian-American festival is history.




r

Ryan now included in Limbaugh family

It was left to Rush Limbaugh to define Paul Ryan in the most succinct manner that matched Socrates' ''Know Thyself" for pithy brevity.  Exclaimed a delirious Rushbo of Ryan:

                                                        "HE'S US!"

...as in them and us?  The campaign has been headed in that direction for a long time. At least we now have the authoritative word from  Rush



.

Mitt's game change doesn't change very much

Well, at least Mitt didn't land on the battleship Wisconsin in flight gear to announce his Mission Accomplished. His political histrionics also began with another  "game change"  with him announcing, and later correcting, Paul Ryan as the "next president of the United States."

With Mitt Romney, you never know.

As I watched Act One of the media cliff-hanger finally played out, I must admit that it all gave me a sense of Yogi Berra's "deje vu all over again".  As some of the pundits  quickly defined  Romney's  choice as the means to ignite his skeptical conservative base - why must conservatives always have to be ignited? -  I recalled the moment from the 2008 GOP presidential convention in which Sarah Palin bounded  onto the stage  to be introduced as John McCain's exciting runningmate.  There was a lot of talk at that time that this firebrand from Alaska or somewhere could be counted on to invigorate McCain's languishing campaign.  Some of the white guys in the the convention crowd showed up wearing buttons teling us that Sarah was "hot".

That, too, was to be the "game changer'", which ultimately led to a not-so-flattering  book and movie.  The irony of it was that it in fact changed Palin's  game of rising  celebrity to that of a slighted  - if wealthier -  bystander in today's political crowd.

Ryan, the right-wing "blue collar" Wisconsin congressman, has a long paper trail that will be fully vetted in neighborhoods  across America by November..  For now, we're content to  conclude that  McMitt Romney has been handed a partner by the hard right, succumbing to, say, William Kristol, the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove,  Wall Street Journal and Tea Party gurus.

You have to wonder.  Haven't the currents polls been telling us that independent voters are giving President Obama a wider edge over Romney?  They have.  But when you've become a captive of a well-nourished radically ideological base, this isn't really isn't something that worries him.

One of these days I may be forced to take Paul Ryan's advice and read Ayn Rand.