I was watching a documentary on Dixie the other day; one of the comments is that one of the worst things you can say in Southernese is "Bless his heart", for that usually means someone did something stoopid or otherwise came up short.
Rick Perry, bless his heart. As a teacher, I've had my memory go AWOL on occasion in the middle of a class and had to look something up or ask a better student the missing factoid. However, I didn't have the misfortune of doing it on national TV in the middle of a presidential debate.
I watched the first hour of last nights debate, which wasn't much of a debate, as most everyone had overlapping views on the economy and "what he said and what she said" was the main order of the day. Mitt graciously passed on a question of whether he'd hire Herman Cain in the middle of his ethical cloud and even Ron Paul made partial sense, given that he had to stay away from foreign policy and blaming Iranian nukes on the US installing the Shah a half-century ago.
Thus, I missed Perry's mental air-ball. It doesn't help his persona, since folks outside of the south take 20 points off of your IQ if you speak with a drawl and an extra 5 points for being from Texas. He seemingly won't live this one down, not unlike Howard Dean's post-Iowa war cry back in 2004.
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Herman Cain now has two public accusers. It's an odd place to have a polygraph test settle a nomination race, but that might be Cain's best path. If he is seen not to be nervous when he disclaims any charges of sexual harassment wrongdoing, that should be enough for most Republican voters. Yes, some folks can give a false negative on a lie-detector, as they are so sociopathic where they can lie without being nervous about it, and some naturally nervous folks can give false positives. Thus, a polygraph can't be totally trusted as evidence in criminal cases, but they can be in the court of public opinion.
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If we're talking brain burps, the NBA is on the verge of a massive one. They seem to be close to settling on a 50-50 split of revenue and are working on the cap-and-trade issues (salary caps and team-changing rules in this case, no global warming here). Both sides will lose more than the 3% they're fighting for (the players had 53 as their bottom line and owners had been shooting for 47) by trashing the 2011-12 (mostly 12 at this point) season over it.
Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail. However, there are a lot of egos who don't take getting dissed lightly, and hotter heads could well blow up the NBA as we know it.
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