Eileen's been out of commission with the flu the last two days, so I've been playing dutiful husband. Hopefully, she'll be back up to speed by next week when school starts back up and her young charges at a local elementary school get back.
The flu is tough, since the doctor can't do much of anything than say go home, rest, drink plenty of liquids and try not to get the rest of the household sick. Since the flu's a virus, antibiotics don't do any good, so you're left with painkillers, decongestants, Jewish penicillin (Mrs Grass' chicken-flavored noodle is our version of that), Gatorade and TCL.
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The Piss-tons. An U-G-H-L-Y Ugh-ly start to the season. The only redeeming value was Brandon Knight going off for 23 off the bench. He needs to start; slide Stuckey to the 2 and let Gordon come off the bench.
Thankfully, I managed to minimize the frustration by watching MSU beat Indiana in a game with more runs than a group of touristas coming back from Mexico.
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Interesting piece on Mitt's roots; politics as a Harvard Business Review case study. While the piece doesn't mention HBR directly, Mitt's Harvard MBA-JD combo does come from a very quant-oriented and problem-solving framework. HBR cases are fixtures in a lot of business classes, being on quite a few syllabi I have taught out of over the years.
Such training gets good answers from a bottom-line standpoint, but lacks verve. However, I'm fearful that the bottom line is to maximize GDP from a stock GOP standpoint, losing sight of bigger moral pictures both left and right.
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Newt is cratering in Iowa, slipping to a weak third. CNN even has Santorum slipping past him into third behind Romney and Paul. It might be South Carolina and Florida where Newt makes a stand and wins one.
The conservative trio of Santorum, Bachmann and Perry all seem to be fighting for fourth, with the exception of the occasional outlier poll. If that CNN poll proves accurate, Santorum could become that conservative alternative.
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Very interesting piece on Ron Paul's newsletter history. His right hand man on those was Lew Rockwell, who veteran bloggers will recognize as a key paleolibertarian with a bad ethnocentric streak. One of my better early posts was a defense of Lincoln from a Rockwell-posted piece trashing him on libertarian grounds as a protectionist, big-government autocrat. Many of the Rockwellians had a Dixiephile streak which was not becoming.
Rockwell and others tried to redo the libertarian sector by running off the left-libertarians who were often there for repealing drug laws and replacing them with paleoconservatives, tacking a Pat Buchanan-style ethnocentrism onto a free-market, free-trade framework. Thus, the only difference between the two paleo camps was free trade.
Rockwell might have ghost-written the stuff put out under Paul's banner, since Paul doesn't seem particularly ethnocentric or racist. Paul should have parted company with Rockwell, or at least not put out some of the race-baiting pieces that did go out.
That should put a ceiling on how well Paul can do, but everyone has seemed to hit a 25% ceiling before coming back down.
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