Mark Byron

O'Brien's Song

Bill O'Brien is getting into a big hornet's nest, taking the Penn State head coaching job once he finishes up the playoffs as New England's offensive coordinator. There is a bit of an echo of Rich Rodriguez coming on at Michigan, as O'Brien has no PSU ties. There is also a bit of a echo of Charlie Weis going from that same Patriot OC slot to Notre Dame.

RichRod lasted three years at Michigan and Weis managed to last five under the shadow of Touchdown Jesus. Weis was a Notre Dame alum, but most of his coaching experience had been at the pro level, possibly making him less effective coaching younger players and doing the recruiting and alumni-management that being a college coach entails. That's a problem that O'Brien doesn't have-

O'Brien joined New England in 2007 following 14 seasons on the college level, including stops at Duke, Maryland and Georgia Tech. He played football at Brown -- Paterno's alma mater.

What got RichRod in trouble from day zero was that he wasn't a "Michigan Man". For a third of a century dating back to 1969, UofM had been run by iconic coach Bo Schembechler and two of his former assistants Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr. Moeller was run off amid a drunk-driving incident but Carr half retired-half-resigned amid a touch of underperformance by Michigan standards.

Michigan alums wanted little to do with this outsider, especially one that ran a trendy spread-option format. That gave him little support to build a program around, so that when he got the team over .500 last year, it was too little, too late.

Penn State alums are already in revolt over O'Brien-

Former Penn State All-American linebacker Brandon Short told ESPN.com senior writer Don Van Natta Jr. that members of the influential Lettermen's Club have a meeting scheduled with Joyner for 1 p.m. ET Friday.

"It's unfortunate that Coach O'Brien ... has not been made aware of the implications of him being in this position," said Short, an investment banker. "I don't envy him at all. He doesn't have support of the vast majority of former Penn State players and the vast majority of the student body and the faculty won't support him. I feel sorry for him."

Short said some members of the group were considering a range of options to express their displeasure, including asking current players to transfer and recruits to de-commit.

That would echo, with a notch more bile, what RichRod went through.

However, I don't think that anyone with a Penn State pedigree that is still alive would make it under the circumstances. Any Penn State grad or former coach would be asked "what did you know about Sandusky and what did you do about it?" A "Penn State Man" would have most likely dealt with Sandusky on some level and get a constant grilling from the media and harassment from anti-child-abuse groups. You'd have to go back to a pre-Paterno era, which would require the coach in question to be well into his 70s, to get free of that taint.

It's sad, since you have a lot of good guys who likely knew next to nothing about their DC being a pervert in his spare time. Under the circumstances, PSU needed to make a clean break and bring in a good outsider.

Tattoos, Tap Outs and Theology

We have a tattooed Pastor Bentley operating in Flint. However, this one is no relation to Todd Bentley of Lakeland Revival infamy. Here's a piece from our local CBS outlet on Steve Bentley Bridge Ministries.

The Bridge has its own tattoo parlor and holds MMA events. The bio for Bentley has him as a Flint native, so he's no direct relation to Todd. Steve also seems non-charismatic, having a theology degree from "ONU" which could be either Olivet Nazarene or Ohio Northern. Ohio Northern is a Methodist school, so Olivet seems more likely.

They are affiliated with a group called Growing Happy Churches, which is a conservative offshoot of the centrist American Baptists-

Now, as of January 1 [2006], the American Baptist Churches of the West, based in the northern California city of San Ramon, wants to be known as Growing Healthy Churches, or GHC for short.

The decision stems partly from the ongoing struggle over homosexuality and local church autonomy in the denomination. Some ABC of the West congregations “find it difficult to be identified with a denomination that will not affirm biblical standards,” the region’s executive minister, Paul D. Borden, wrote to pastors November 30.

A quick glance at the GHC literature seems a bit detailed oriented and somewhat authoritarian looking. Couple that with the MMA stuff and it sounds a lot like Mark Driscoll.

Interesting. Questionable, but interesting. If Bieber wants more Christian tatts, he might do worse than here.

Keeping Tab on the Crosstabs

Here's an interesting Washington Times NH poll with some interesting breakdowns by demographics.

Ron Paul does best among Catholics, which Rick Santorum does twice as well with Protestants than with Catholics.

Romney owns the C&E churchgoers, Santorum does best among folks who go more than once a week and Paul does well among once-a-weekers along with folks who rarely or never go to church. Paul is weakest among causual church goers.

Newt has a positive gender gap, scoring 7% with guys and 12% with gals. One would think it would be the other way around. Paul is the one with a big negative gender gap and if single folks could rule, Paul would win.

The HEAV Act- Part I - A Modest Proposal

Here's a little political thought experiment that will likely make me lose any conservative street cred that I have, if my last post didn't do it already.

The next Republican president puts forward a proposal to give every K-12 student a $2000 voucher to go to whatever school the student wants to go to on the condition that the school district that the student is in matches the voucher. If the kid goes to public schools, the system gets two grand from Uncle Sam, no strings attached. As part of the deal, No Child Left Behind and most other federal school regulations are scrapped. Special Ed and other high-degree-of-difficulty students will get higher voucher amounts to account for the lower teacher-student ratios in such programs.

That will put school districts $2K ahead for the kids they currently have and $2K in the hole for kids in private schools. $4k won't get you into BlueNose Academy, but it will get you into the local Catholic or evangelical school with a bit out of pocket.

Using my local schools as a guide, Blessed Sacrament charges $5000 for non-parisioners and Calvary Baptist charges $4600 for kids of non-members. The $4K voucher will cover the lion share of that, and many schools charging more than that might wind up "eating the co-pay" if they can make up the difference in donations.

After the NEA is done throwing a conniption fit, Senate Democrats make a counter-offer. We'll go with your voucher plan for K-12 if you make the Ryan-Wyden plan open to all citizens rather than just those on Medicare. Here's a write-up on the plan from last month

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan on Thursday [12/15/11] plan to introduce a new Medicare reform plan that would allow seniors to choose between traditional Medicare and new private insurance programs.

The plan has some key differences from the Ryan blueprint that Republicans had rallied around earlier this year — and which Democrats had been united in pummelling in Congress and on the campaign trail as the beginning of the end of Medicare.

Dirty Harry and friends will push Obamacare under the bus if we make everyone eligible for Medicare and give them the option of taking a voucher for the average cost of coverage to an insurance company. If they already have a labor contract with qualifying coverage at work, they can cash in the voucher and keep their coverage. New labor contracts will see the voucher go to the employer if the employee wants the company health insurance.

The downside is that will cost money; the reason they needed the individual mandate is that didn't require shelling out cash for most folks and stuck the tab with businesses and the self-employed. We'll have the Cain Memorial VAT tax, a 9% tax on all purchases, with credit for VAT tax paid for supplies. The CBO has yet to score this bill, but they estimate that 9% should cover the cost of providing health care to all pre-seniors.

After Rand Paul gets done with some colorful verbiage and a 13-hour one-man filibuster, the Senate takes up consideration of the Health and Education Voucher Act

Assuming there isn't any killer details in the HEAV Act, would that be something that would make sense?

Rick and the Establishmentarians

Libertarians won't like Rick Santorum much. He's both a social conservative and somewhat economically moderate. Since he's been gone from the Senate since 2006, we have to take the Wayback Machine for a spin to get his ACU ratings.

89.7, 89.1, 88.1 sounds like a NPR station guide (or K-LOVE, for that matter), but that's the career ratings for Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch and Santorum as olf 2006. We can throw in Bill Frist's 87.8 and John Thune's 87.0, but they ruin the bottom of the FM dial vibe since they have even tenths and 87.7 is the bottom of the FM dial.

That's a rogue's gallery of establishment Republicans save Santorum. Hatch is having to fend off a primary fight from Tea Partiers this year, but he's far from a RINO. Thune was getting some mention as a presidential runner, but that never got too far.

Newt pitched a 90 in his House career if we wind Sir Wayback back eight years further. Yes, the hard-core pundits on the right don't like him, either, but trying to slide Santorum to the left of Newt is a non-starter. Ron Paul had a 82% career rating as of 2006, so he isn't a great pick on that front, although there are often votes where Paul will vote no where the conservative position isn't conservative enough.

90% or close to it still gives political carnivores 10% or so to she-dog at. It doesn't make one so "left on the issues that matter he makes even Mitt Romney look like a red meat conservative", as Ross Kaminsky quotes James Delingpole as saying of Santorum. I guess Romneycare doesn't matter much.

In Kaminsky's case, it seems that the social conservative side has caught his ire, thus requiring sounding like a Delingpolock to make the fiscal conservative trashing.

If we were to ACU Romney, he'd likely be in the 70s as a governor but talking in the 90s as a candidate. He'd likely have been in that high 80s range were he in the Senate for the last decade plus.

We have three flavors of establishment conservative and whatever Ben and Jerry's would dream up (Libertarian Lemon-Lime? Von Mises Fudge Pieces?) for Paul. None are going to be mistaken for a modern American liberal (although Paul and Newt could pass for a classic liberal), and only Paul could earn a RINO lable as he toys with the idea (or at least doesn't clearly preclude it) of turning back into a capital-l Libertarian.

Are any of them paragons of conservative virtue? Santorum on a good day can look like a paragon of virtue (sometimes to a fault), but there are times where the two aren't one and the same.

Pick your flavor and move along. Bachmann Green Tea Party is off the menu and Chicken-Fried Perry Berry can still be requested if you ask the waitress nicely.

 

 

Blackjack, Rick

I didn't know Rick Santorum is a gambler, but he just got 21... percent of the Republican vote in a post-Iowa Rasmussen national poll. Romney gets 29% and Newt is back at 16%. Paul finished out the lead pack with 12%, with bottom-feeders Perry and Huntsmann each at 4%.

This is an interesting baseline vote. He was bottom-feeding right with Perry and Huntsmann at 4% in national polls before the new year, but he got an instant 17% bump post-Iowa.

The nightmare for conservatives (other than the picky ones, for whom none of the top four thrills them) is that the three-way split of the non-Mitt vote lets Romney slide in with 35% pluralities in winner-take-all settings. Paul isn't going anywhere but a few shuttle trips back to the mothership, so we need to have some sort of settling of that Newt-Santorum split before the winner-take-alls kick in. Between the two, they have 37%, and even a 4% bleed out to Romney (some of the loser's backers might prefer Mitt) would have a 33-33 split.

Dick Morris was on one of the evening Fox talkers (I think O'Reilly-I was surfing in during a bad Pistons loss, honest) saying that Newt needed to take on Santorum. Only if Newt wants to play scorched earth; the two seem to get along and might be a decent ticket. If Newt is as much an ideas-guy has he claims to be, getting a fellow traveler in the White House would be a good concellation prize for a surprisingly effective run so far.

The question to watch is whether people like Santorum when they see him or whether the barrage of attack ads bring him down. When they have pre-NH debates this weekend, he'll be at the adult table for a change, but also open to snipes over the Bridge to Nowhere, the Specter-Toomey primary and other deviations from Tea Party orthodoxy.

Man, has this been a poli-sci geek's dream campaign, with more twists than a Kentucky back road. And we've just had the first votes two days ago.

 

Thursday Musings

The WaPo "factcheckers" go for some low-hanging fruit on a Santorum rhetorical flourish that everyone on the West Bank are Israelis. Yes, I'm about 99.99% sure that the former senator knows about the facts on the ground, but was merely stating his thought that Israel has historial rights to the territory.

On those grounds, these folks would give JFK four Pinoccihios for "Ich bin ein Berliner"-- if he were a Republican.

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The Broad Street Bullies are alive and well; just ask these poor NY Ranger fans who went south to Philly.

The graphic video shows three suspects wearing Philadelphia Flyers jerseys beating and kicking the two victims outside Geno's Steaks in South Philly at 7:15 p.m.

If they listened to Santorum, they would know better than do the wit or witout shtick-that's a Pat's thing.

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Meanwhile, while we're digesting all things Iowa (and thinking about digesting a classic cheesesteak), the president is trying to pull a fast one by trying to recess appoint three NLRB members and the head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The fine print of the CFPB law might keep the new boss, Richard Cordray, from taking control, since it keeps that authority in the Treasury department until a head is approved by the Senate.

That doesn't affect the NLRB folks, however. The problem is that the normal rule for recess appointments is that Congress has to be out of session for at least three days for it to be considered eligable for a recess appointment, lest the President use it in the middle of the night when Congress is not in session.

The Senate has been in pro-forma session over the Christmas break, just showing up every few days and counting heads, in order to block such a recess appointment. That's a trick both sides of the aisle have used; Democrats used that trick to block Bush appointees in the 2007-8 session.

Thus, there is game-playing on both sides here, but the Senate pro-formas are at least constitutional if not sneaky. Trying to use a recess appoitment on an overnight adjournment is a lot like calling not buying something interstate commerce.

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Speaking of Santorum, he's single-handedly redeeming the sweater-vest after Jim Tressel gave it a bad name in Tattoogate. He's got vested authority even without holding office.

 

Iowa + 1

As expected, Michelle Bachmann has bowed out of the race. 5% on her home turf just doesn't give her much to go on. She did show some very good chops on foreign policy and has room to stay a player in national politics for a good while forward.

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I'm not sure what will come of this, but something of a theocon smoke-free smoke-filled-room is set for this weekend in Texas to "come to a consensus on which Republican presidential candidate or candidates to support, or which not to support.” No, I don't think the Southern Poverty Law Center got an invite, since Dobson and Wildmon did. It might be the party to do a Rick Roll, rolling Perry to support Santorum.

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John McCain's backing Romney. That will help in some quarters, but it will make Romney look more establishmentarian to conservatives. They didn't care for McCain last time, don't care for Romney then and now, and a merger of the two won't impress them much.

 

 

No Dispassionate Conservatives, Sorry

As we get up this moring, the Iowa tally has Romney 8 votes ahead of Santorum, 30,015 to 30, 007. A squeaker at 25% each. Paul came in at 22, Newt got 14, Perry 11 and Bachmann 5.

Over at Red State, Mr. Erickson isn't happy with the results-

Bachmann, the Iowa native, won not a single county. Even Rick Perry won two counties. Bachmann must drop out. Frankly, it makes sense for Perry to do so as well except for one issue.

If Rick Perry drops out of the race it will be the ultimate failure of the tea party movement to see the race come down to two or three big government conservatives. Romney and Santorum both hide behind compassionate conservatism to expand the state to suit their purposes. Only Rick Perry has run a campaign to make Washington “as inconsequential to our lives as possible.”

The Tea Party is roughly equal parts secular libertarian and Christian free-marketers. The latter has a champion in Ron Paul, who's 22% showing in Iowa keeps in well in the mix for delegates even as he has little chance of actually getting the nomination.

The former started to coalesce around Herman Cain before his campaign imploded, but never settled on a second choice after that. A Perrymann fusion would have gotten a solid 16% and finished fourth, but wouldas, couldas and shouldas always take three to five strokes off your golf game.

Perry has a shot at taking a deep breath and taking one last shot at it in South Carolina. However, it might prove to be a suicide mission that would kill off everyone but Romney and Paul once the dust settles.

If Perry goes out gracefully, we're left with Ron Paul and three folks who are center-left within the GOP, at least on economics. 63% of the Iowa electorate voted for that troika and only 37% voted for Tea Party-friendly candidates. That doesn't please conservatives, but that's where we are at present. Compassionate conservatism sold better than either dispassionate conservatism or passionate ....[must....delete ...pejorative] ...Paulism.

Pruning Night

I'm listening to Rick Perry's post-caucus speech. He seems to be ready to pack it in; he's heading back to Texas to think through what comes next. That's not encouraging if you're a Perry fan.

Perry's in at 11% with 96% reporting. I felt 10% was the cutoff for him to keep at it, but with Santorum in a dead heat with Romney at 25%, Santorum won the social conservative primary. There's very little room for Perry to be the nominee at this point, lest he be drafted later on.

Bachmann only got 6%. She sounded defiant but rumor has her bowing out.

Newt got 14% and is moving forward.

Ron Paul is in at 22%. He's very unlikely to be the nominee, but has a following.

Since the raw vote isn't an issue in the delegate process, there is no recount, but this is recount-close, with only 13 votes separating Romney and Santorum as I go to press. Santorum wins the night even if he finishes in a really close second.

Iowa-1

If the polling stays to form, we can write off at least one candidate after Iowa tomorrow night-Michelle Bachmann. If she fails to get more than 10% (she's at 7% on average of the two out today), she has little leverage to go forward if she can't do better than 6th in her birth state. She'll have to crack 10% to be in the conversation going forward.

Rick Perry needs a double-digit showing to keep in the hunt. He might be able to take a 9% showing and limp into SC, but if he can nudge Newt out for fourth, he might be able to make a case for being a conservative alternative. Right now, that's a 15 Newt-10 Perry spread, so Perry is likely on life support going forward with the plug to be pulled post-SC.

Newt...good question. A fourth place showing in Iowa will be troubling, but he does have the lead in both SC and Florida. Unless he somehow craters into single digits, he's still in the game.

Rick Santorum is suddenly in the conversation. A win makes him a major player in SC and a minor one in NH. He can win a lot of Newt support as a viable conservative (broadly defined-economic conservatives don't like him much) alternative to Romney and pick up the Perry and Bachmann backers looking for a home.

A close second or third makes him the soclal conservative candidate going forward, where a 25% plurality will be in the hunt in a four or five-way race.

Romney would get some props for a win here, but a low-20s plurality will be nothing to brag about.

Ron Paul? A win doesn't trash the caucus; he's got a 10% niche market who punch above their weight in caucuses. He also might get some Democratic crossover votes; Iowa voters have to become GOP members to vote, but other primary states allow voters to choose their primary, and with a lack of a race on the Democratic side, we'll likely see some raiding there.

Paul can force a convention if he can keep people from getting close to a majority, but he doesn't seem to have a realistic chance of winning the nomination. Might getting Rand on the ticket as the VP be one possibility to keep him on board?

Tomorrow night will prove interesting.

Bowl Morning Musings

DeMarcus Cousins might be on the move, as he seems to have had a falling out with Sacramento management. The Kings picked him just before the Pistons snagged Greg Monroe in the 2010 draft; having been down in Lexington for Cousins' one year there, I was disappointed at the time. However, Monroe has turned into a very serviceable big man, looking more and more like a young Tim Duncan.

Cousins is emotional and a bit of a head case, but I recall Rasheed Wallace had that same rep when he hit Detroit; he became a key cog in the Piston's good late-00s clubs. Cousins could be had for a late (or delayed) first-rounder if he's become persona non grata in SAC. Detroit has a need for a good big man, and Cousins might be worth rolling the dice for.

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Santorum on the move. The polls seem to point to him in a sold third and closing fast. If some Perry, Newt and Bachmann voters opt to slide to Santorum, he could become part of the lead pack.

Someone from the right needs to emerge for that part of the electorate to the right of Newt and Mitt and not in orbit in the Paul system. Santorum might not have the money of the big boys in the race, but a 20% or better showing gets him at the adult table.

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Detroit and Denver backed into playoff spots. It's odd to see Denver hosting Pittsburgh in a first-rounder, as the Steelers just missed being the top seed.