Mark Byron

Thursday Musings

Isaac looks like it is more interested in Pensacola than Tampa, as the revised projection has it steering clear of the peninsular Gulf Coast. At least the core will steer clear (if the projections hold); that leaves the oft-ugly right side of the storm to rake Tampa just as the GOP sets up shop there.

Before that, Haiti is slated to take it in the neck. Just what they need; Mother Nature has it in for those poor folks.

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Bad injuries make bad law, as I learned in Business Law class; a Little Leaguer whose heart stopped after a line drive got $14.5M from a package of Little League, the bat maker and the bat retailer. The premise is that the bats make the ball go too fast when hit. 

That being said, how fast is too fast? Would the Louisville Slugger folks be on the hook for the next killer line drive from a wood bat? Is a sports supplies store on the hook when the definition of safety shifts without a clear ruling? This one is sure to get appealed; it could spell the end of youth baseball if this became precident for baseball law.

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How hairy is Harry? He does have a wild side; I recall him getting caught smoking ganja, which prompted a slew of Harry Pothead or Harry Potted jokes.

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Anarchy in the US? Tampa would be vunerable to protest, since they could easily cut off St. Pete by blockading a few bridges.

Midweek Musings

Artur Davis stumping for Romney is almost a non-story if you've been following his migration from black Blue Dog congressman to Republican beltway lawyer over the last few years. However, Davis did second Obama's nomiation four years ago, so there's a bit of news there. Interestingly, he stumping in his new home turf of Virgina rather than Alabama; Romney doesn't need the help down there and VA is a swing state.

Davis might help more with white Blue Dog voters in VA than blacks; the latter is a tough demographic to crack while the former is increasingly in play as blue-collar voters see less and less of a rationale to vote Democratic if they work in the private sector.

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This might be a vision of a less-civil political future; someone tried to shoot up the Family Research Council HQ in Washington. Thankfully, this disgruntled liberal didn't know how to do an assault well; there were no fatalities and only a security guard was shot.

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Sad meltdown for Ocho Cinco. He gets arrested for head-butting his new wife, gets fired by the Fins and gets divorce papers filed... oh, and the reality show that was to follow the happy couple got cancelled. The guy needs prayer and therapy more than he needs a new contract, although he should have some miles left in the odometer once he gets his emotions under check; despite all the NFL fines and histrionics, this is his first run-in with the law.

Friday Musings

It looks like the Tigers have called up Andy Dirks and let Don Kelly go; Kelly has been "designated for assignment" so they have 20 days to either waive him, trade him or get his OK to go to the minors. His outfield-3B package can be duplicated by fast-rising Nick Castellanos, and Castellanos is a right-hander. With three corner-outfielders coming from the left (Berry, Dirks and Boesch) and Cabrera entrenched at 3B and doing a decent job, there isn't much of a spot for him anymore.

In the off-season, they'll likely need to move one of those three lefties, unless they opt to DH Boesch and then use Castellanos as a utility guy to give everyone a breather, especially against lefties.

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8.3% unemployment, up a tenth. Not good for a sitting president. Since WWII, the worst unemployment rate for an incumbent president was 7.5%, four times (hat time to Bryan Preston for the link). Other than a lame-duck Dubya, the other three were Ford, Carter and Bush pere; all three lost.

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Chick-fil-A kiss-in day was today. One case of vandalism in CA was noted, and one case of theological vandalism here as well-

[Kiss-in participant Luke] Montgomery said Jesus Christ never said anything about gay people. Referring to Cathy, the activist said, "He needs to open the Bible before he opens his mouth."

Actually, if you accept Jesus as part of God, then the dictation that Moses got in the Old Testiment would include Him. However, that's not going to fit their paradigm.

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The General Assembly of the UN gave the Security Council the middle digit sal-oot over Syria.

The assembly adopted the Saudi-sponsored resolution 133-12 with 31 abstentions. It came a day after Kofi Annan announced his resignation as the U.N. and Arab League special envoy to Syria.

As they'd say down south, Kofi, bless his heart. The UN lifer gave it a go, but you can only help the little old lady across the street if she wants to go; frog marching her across isn't in Annan's DNA.

Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Syria were among those voting against the resolution. Algeria, India and Pakistan were among those abstaining. Of Syria's neighbors, Lebanon abstained, and Iraq, Jordan and Turkey voted for the resolution.

That would give the US and its friends some backup were they to do something; it would run counter to Obama's multilateralist mindset, but he's been known to go against form from time to time, like with the Rolling Drones and taking out Osama.

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Speaking of Osama, I saw an interesting T-shirt at lunch-"The Bin Laden Cocktail-Two shots and a splash."

 

Midweek Musings

The president is playing the gun control card post-Aurora: "AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals."  I think Kirilenko's not quite ready to coach West Point after signing with Minnesota.

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Interesting piece on Apple's profit-stash overseas; about $74 billion of profits earned overseas have yet to be repatriated. That's a bit bigger thatn UPS and would be the 59th largest company were it to be spun off.

Note that it is perfectly legal and not sleazy. However, since Apple is cool, don't expect liberals to dog on them for their overseas exploits.

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This story hit over the weekend; the IMF's head European economist, Peter Doyle left and dissed his bosses for slowness and timidity.

Mr Doyle, former adviser to the IMF's European Department, which is running the bailout programs for Greece, Portugal and Ireland, said the Fund's delay in warning about the urgency of the global financial crisis was a failure of the "first order".

Big entities tend to run slowly, and the IMF is no exception. Since it's an international consortium that no one country controls, they are functionally independent, so they can take their sweet time to do things; however, doing things slowly is often not a bad thing, since you're rather them screw things up in small doses rather than hose a country with austerity up the five hole.

Interestingly, the Doyle name brought back memories of David Doyle, Charlie's Angels' supervisor. While I was a-Doyleing, I spotted Jerry Doyle, who was the security chief on Babylon 5 and is now a Paulista talk show host. I like this quip about his role as Garibaldi, a "Mick from Brooklyn playing a Wop from Mars."

Thursday Musings

Interesting piece on the future of Mexico's PAN. Things don't seem that bad on the ground, since the winning PRI presidential candidate is from the pro-market neoliberal wing of the party and a PAN-PRI coalition with PAN as the junior partner might be easier to get things done than with the PRI in opposition.

After 12 years, swing voters wanted to give some one else a shot; thankfully (on economics, at least), it seems that Mexico got Bill Clinton rather than Barack Obama when they replaced their conservatives, incoming presidente Pena is more like Slick Willie both on economics and on sexual proclivities.

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This is the year of the Black Mormon. First, we have Utah's first Haitian woman congressional candidate in Mia Love and now we have young Jabari Parker. He's being compared to LeBron James as a basketball prodigy, and made news by cutting his school list down to 10, including BYU; he's going to be a senior this year and would prefer to stay close to home in Chicago.

One interesting aspect is that Parker might be one-and-done-for-now if he follows the Mormon pattern of spending two years on mission at 19. He'd likely be leaving $20M on the table if he spends those two years before being drink-legal (clown metaphor, bro) doing something other than terrorizing NBA defenders.

Both BYU and Kentucky (another one on his list) are used to losing freshman, but BYU normally expects to get theirs back.

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If you've got Yahoo e-mail, you might want to change your password.

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Interesting piece on setting the timing for Ramadan. Thing are moving towards an astronomical definition that can allow it to be firmly placed in advance, but since there is no one Islamic authority, things vary from place to place; we have an Orthodox-Western split on the liturgical calendar, but this makes Christians look like a focus of unity.

Keep that in mind in conversations about Sharia; there isn't one take on how to be Muslim, as this Ramadan-timing story shows, so we shouldn't assume a Taliban version when the S-word is bandied about.

 

Saturday Musings

Is it Mursi or Morsi? Either way, he got sworn in as Egyptian president. He rattled some cages yesterday in a speech prior to his inaugural

He told the Tahrir crowd he would work to secure freedom for Omar Abdul Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric jailed for life over the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"I will do everything in my power to secure freedom for detainees... including Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman," Mursi said in his address to the throng packing the hub of the 2011 revolution.

That will not sit well on this side of the Atlantic.

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Lamar Odom gets to head back to Tinseltown, as the Clippers picked him up from Dallas in a four-way deal. What Odom could use is to borrow from Dallas the TV show, and wake up to find that the last year was all a bad dream. Running fast breaks with Blake Griffith on the other wing would work nicely if he can get the bad taste and inactivity of last year out of the way.

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One posited legal solution to nixing "Obamacare" is to dwell on the fact that the Senate essentially wrote the law when the House is required to start money bills in the Constitution; Samidzata has an example of the meme here.

Minor problem-lots of laws nominally start in the House, but then the Senate deletes almost all the House's origional and put in their version as an "amendment." If the House agrees to the changes, it goes to the President; if not, we get a conference committee to hash out the differences, which then gets voted on by the House, then the Senate.

In the case at hand, the House approved the Senate version without a conference committee; by the time the House had voted, Scott Brown had gotten into the Senate and took away the 60th vote to get any new revisions past, so they passed the Senate version as-is to avoid having a second vote in the Senate. It was a nasty fight, since pro-life provisions in the starter-version had been trimmed in the Senate and pro-life Democrats like Bart Stupak had to be strong-armed into going along.

Nuking Obamacare on those grounds would throw a truckload of laws (likely most) that were amended wholesale in the Senate; that would create a mess that neither Roberts or Kennedy is likely to sign off on. Even Thomas and Scalia might pass on going that far.

Friday Musings

Reality sets in for Republicans after last night's contempt-of-Congress vote on AG Holder; who gets to do the proscecuting? The Justice Department, headed by a guy named Holder. They'll work like good BBQ, low and slow rather than fast and furious.

The interesting question is whether a Romney-era Justice department can bring charges on the former boss if we get to that point. Is there a statute of limitations on a contempt charge so that if Obama does win, a future administration might bring it up in 2017 or later?

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On a lighter note, the draft was interesting. Kentucky tied its own record by having six players drafted, including the top two for the first time ever. Detroit's pick of Andre Drummond was a good one, an 18-year-old shot-blocker who looks like a poor-man's Anthony Davis, or a taller Ben Wallace. If Big Ben can be persuaded to stick around, either as a player or assistant coach, he could even help his free-throw shooting, which was at 29% at UConn last year. That can't be said of too many players.

Little Ben, Ben Gordon, got shipped off to Charlotte for Cory Maggette; the Bobcats get a future #1 as well for eating Gordon's bloated (at least a on bang-for-buck basis) contract. Maggette might work well as a off-the-bench swingman, getting starter minutes in a four-man 123 rotation with Knight, Stuckey and Prince.

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Interesting story out of Foggy Bottom, where our Keynan ambassidor resigned, seemingly having issues with the most famous Kenyan since Kip Keino.

US envoy to Kenya Scott Gration has announced his resignation, citing "differences in leadership style and priorities" with Washington.

That is what we call diplomatic. There is a far bigger story there, if Gration or one of his aids is willing to talk. Since Keyna borders Somalia, it is a key location geopolitically, and a former Air Force general might have wanted something different from what his bosses wanted.

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"Zimmerman Seeks New Bond." I'm not a big fan of Daniel Craig, either. Hugh Jackman would be a nice change.

Saturday Musings

60 years. That's what Jerry Sandusky will get at minimum for his pedophilia. The sad part of the story is that guys who honestly want to help boys will get tarred with that brush as people avoid having repeats of this, since Sandusky often found targets through his youth charity.

On the good side, the case is behind us coming up to the start of football season this fall, letting PSU try to start anew. A detente with the Paterno clan might be nice, even though it's too late for JoePa himself.

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Touchy times in the eastern Med, as Syria shot down a Turkish jet that crossed into Syrian waters. Given that Turkey is part of NATO, that could trigger a reaction, but the Turkish government doesn't seem to be pressing the issue, essentially saying "Oops, our bad."

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Add another story to the "nothing good happens at a nightclub at 2AM" file-Tony Parker got hit by the crossfire of a bar fight and had some eye damage; he's suing the nightclub. That knocks the chances of the French team down a notch, but the US likely losing Dwayne Wade will even things out.

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By the way, congratulations to Miami on their NBA title, getting that monkey off LeBron's back. I'm not one of the haters, but was rooting for OKC, since Miami had cast itself as the NBA's Yankees. That being said, you can still appreciate Jeter and A-Rod and root against the Pinstripes, and you can appreciate the triple-double-machine the same way.

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Here's an interesting story I stumbled into as we came back from TN this week; the Free Hills settlement in northern TN, where freed slaves from the Hill plantation settled and created a rare free-black community in the pre-Civil War south. I just noted the road sign as we were going past and checked out the story once we got back.

 

Midnight Musings

The Tigers took another ugly one on the chin, 4-2 to Cleveland. Quintin Berry got on with a hit batter, stole second and came home on a double, starting to make Leyland have to think about sliding him to left once Jackson gets off the DL. Poor Matt Young wasn't as lucky, getting the golden sombrero, going 0/4 with four strikeouts.

The natives are getting restless; Lloyd McClendon's head on the chopping block might be a possible knee-jerk but positive move, with bringing Leon Durham up from Toledo to take over as hitting coach. There are too many Leyland folks on the coaching staff to fire the big guy mid-season, but Durham seems to be getting stuff out of the folks in Toledo.

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Walker's up 54-45 with 88% in. Unless the unions empty out the Chicago graveyards and got the zombies to do same-day registration in Madison, that should hold up. As the old Hewittism goes, if it ain't close, they can't cheat. I would still like to see the focus group of the folks who are Walker-Obama voters, since Obama leads in the polls.

The answer is, if I can borrow from the old US Grant line, to find out what Walker's been drinking and send a case of it to Mitt Romney; let's hope it's non-alcoholic.

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The body-parts killer was caught in Berlin and is heading back to Canada once extradition papers go through; Mr. Magnotta is behaving once in custody. The strange thing (of many in this case) is that he was caught in a Internet cafe reading about himself. Might I suggest Dracula's theme song, You're so Vein, as music for the occasion.

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What's with Slick Willie? Going rogue and plugging for a full extension of tax cuts, including the upper brackets. He's triangulating, but he's not the one on the ballot. This will be interesting to watch, to see if he continues to distance himself from his wife's boss.

Friday Musings

St Pete's gets to announce a new arrival, but he has to do it like the Notre Dame PA guy-"Or-land-oh-WOOOOOOOOOOOL-ridge." Dying of heart trouble at 52; time flies, it doesn't seem like it was three decades ago he and Bill Laimbeer were taking the Irish deep into the top 20 with Digger Phelps at the helm.

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Some white-hat hackers are on the job, following up the Stuxnet worm that messed with Iranian nuke processors with a Flame malware that does a lot of spying on its host. At least it seems white-hat from here, since Iranian computers are the most affected; thus, fingers are pointing at the US and Israel as possible writers. One can only hope the Iranians or other enemies of the US (like the Anonymous folks who trash US policy) are doing the same thing back at us, since the really good hacks go undetected.

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This is a bit old, but this story on Google buying Motorola's phone business seems troubling. What's odd is that it was the Chinese government giving the last crutial blessing with the proviso that the Android system stay available to other phone makers rather than become a propriatry Motorola thing.

Vertical intergration need not be bad for the market, but when Google's energy will be focused somewhat onto the Motorola brand, it weakens the rest of the market, letting Microsoft have an easier time of dominating the remainder of the non-Apple universe.

Midweek Musings

An odd news day. Here's one from Ottawa, where someone sent Tory HQ a foot. It sounds like a plotline tailor-made for Bones, who has a recurring character of a Canadian forensic pediatrist. This is one the specialist could sink his teeth into.

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Another mystery comes out of Texas, where a serial candidate came out of nowhere to get 26% of the vote in the Democratic senate primary and a spot in a runoff-

It was retired educator Grady Yarbrough of San Antonio, described by the AP as “a perennial candidate who has run as a Democrat and a Republican in previous elections.”

Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson chalked it up to the place that the late former U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough still holds in Democrats’ very fiber although his time in the Senate was decades ago and his name is spelled slightly differently.

That's what came to mind when I saw his name; the late senator was a liberal Democrat who happened to have held the seat up this year until Lloyd Benson primaried him in 1970. As a non-Texas, it just hit a distant cord as "wasn't there a senator by that name?" but quite a few folks seem to have taken the bait.

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The bigger story was that LG Dewhurst got held under 50%, forcing a runoff with conservative favorite Ted Cruz on the GOP side. Cruz has his work cut out for him, making up a 46-32 gap without being able to self-fund and with the Rick Perry machine out for his LG. However, runoffs will tend to lean conservative, so Cruz has a shot.

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Dennis the Menace isn't the only multi-state congressional candidate possibility; Artur Davis is switching both state and party, becoming a Republican and looking at a congressional run in Virginia; he went native and is working in DC since losing his Alabama congressional seat.

There's little chance Kucinich would change party, unless it's to become a Green.

Question Me an Answer

CNN has a couple of bad questions posing as headlines on their web site

"Is it ok to be racist outside of school?" No. Is it legal, all else being equal. Yes.

The essay dealt with MA kids whose tweets racially dissed a black Washington player after he knocked Boston out of the NHL playoffs; their school is disciplining them for their extracurricular behavior, which the essayist noted is of dubious First Amendment legality.

Lots of things are legal and even constitutionally protected,  but not OK.

Are we seeing a 'Mexican Spring'? No, you're just seeing the Mexican left using social media. The Mexican Spring came a decade ago when the PRI allowed itself to lose to the right-of-center PAN; now, the PAN has spent a decade-plus in charge and has lost its freshness and the race for president is between the establishment-left PRI and the hard-left PRD (Canadian Liberal versus NDP might be a fair comparison if you had Howard Dean off his meds heading up the NDP; letting Canada annex Vermont is always worth dreaming of).

Last go-round, the PRD candidate, Andres Lopez Obrador lost a squeaker to the PAN candidate and protested like crazy even after a recount confirmed a Calderon win. Lopez Obrador is heading up the PRD ticket again, and has Mexico's noventa y neuve por ciento hot and bothered like a 2008 version of Obama; since Lopez Obrador's party has never won the Mexican presidency, he looks like the pristine outsider.

Yeah, you have leftist youth using social media. Youth use social media unless they are totally dirt poor these days. However, Mexico in 2012 isn't a unreformed dictatorship in need of a peaceful revolution; Mexico 2018 might be if Lopez Obrador gets in.

 

Tuesday Musings

The NewsCorp phone-hacking scandal seems to have Our Ms. Brooks as its poster girl. You always see that red Kenny G mane of hair whenever Murdock's minions are on the hot seat.

Everyone outside of the Murdock empire seems to have a special level of glee at their troubles. So far, it doesn't seem to have made it over to the Fox side of things, as it is mostly the British papers in the chain, including the now-defunct News of the World, that were up to their eyeballs in naughty actions.

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Here's another one of those Britishisms; "takeaway" is British for take-out food. Thus, you had a Bengali-Brit busted renting out Spice Girls along with spicy Indian food at his takeaway.

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Snakes on a plain .... bag of mulch, man. Go easy on the ganga next time.

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That's one rich boy in the hoodie. I'm not sure what percentage Zuckerberg has in Facebook, but the whole thing is looking at a $100B market cap. When you're delivering the goods at that level, you can wear your PJs to a meet-and-greet on Wall Street. If you're a small-capper, you might need to dress up, but Zuckerberg is a 800 pound gorilla who dresses like he wants; you're going to tell him to put the tie back on?

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Interesting moves in BC, where the Liberals are the main party of the right in provincial politics. However, the Conservatives are gaining ground on the provincial Grits to a point where merger talks are being discussed. With Wildrose doing well, but not well enough, in Alberta next door, seeing BC go the other route and have a grand coalition of the center-right seems unlikely; there's just too much political ground to see a coalition that can cover 60%+ of the vote, especially when the current government is a bit squishy and on its heels.

A three-way Liberal-Conservative-NDP fight on the provincial level not unlike the voting on a federal level, might be what the next election sees.

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I gave up on the Tigers this afternoon when they fell behind 6-0 while I went to get Eileen from work; my mistake. The Tigers put up an 8-spot in the 6ths and hung on to a 10-8 win; even weak-hitting Ryan Rayburn got into the act, tripling his RBI total for the year with a homer and 4RBIs. Maybe Rayburn actually has game and didn't have a picture of Jim Leyland in flagrante delicto with a Pekinese.

Monday Night Meanders

Here's an interesting piece on Heathrow Airport's future; the premise is that a two-runway airport isn't going to be sustainable as a hub and that they need to expand. I don't know the logistics there, but many airports have sufficient NIMBY issues where expansion is problematic, especially when the city grows up around the airport.

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One interesting aspect of reading the Telegraph piece was that I had banner ads plugging a local Michigan college. Read globally, get ads locally.

Or at least localized. Some of the cheesy ads are in [insert city here] format. The ad that was running for the Lexington mom earning beaucoup bucks only looks like a dead ringer for the Midland mom doing the same thing.

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One interesting way around visa rules; have the office space in international waters. Thus, workers can get a visitor visa and commute out to the office ship moored 12 miles off SanFran. They're not working in the US, just living there, and a tourist visa is easier to get than a green card or H1 tech-worker visa.

Getting broadband out to the ship is the big trick; a long extention cord might be an option in the form of an underwater cable out to the ship's locale.

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A canine worship service? Everybody sing- "I am a friend of Dog, I am a friend of Dog, I am a friend of Dog, he calls me friend." Great is thy faithfullness, indeed.

Monday Moanin'

Someone must of translated Johnathan Swift into Chinese, for they have a modest drug business... of powdered baby.

The grim trade is being run from China where corrupt medical staff are said to be tipping off medical companies when babies are aborted or delivered still-born.

The tiny corpses are then bought, stored in household refrigerators in homes of those involved in the trade before they are removed and taken to clinics where they are placed in medical drying microwaves.

...

There is a huge demand for alternative Chinese remedies - which include ground up rhino horns.

Better keep Richard Lugar well away from the Far East, then, if they're using RINOs in that way. No, that is not their highest and best use.

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Lugar is getting primaried and is using most every trick in the moderate's book, including making the challenger look like a wingnut, reaching across to the other party for extra votes and making himself out to be the only reasonable choice. State treasurer Richard Mourdock looks to have him beat, and the closer he gets to losing, the more Lugar looks like Bill Milliken, getting bitterer by the year as he aged into RINO dependency.

Lugar had a decent dose of class over the years, but seems to have lost it along with any political future. Indiana law precludes a third-party or independent run for folks who lost a primary, so a Murkowski/Lieberman route won't hunt in the Hoosier State.

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France is in for a hard adjustment if incoming president Hollande really wants to declare war on finance. What do you replace it with? A slow grind into state-run autarky and equal-but-poor living somewhere north of Cuban wage levels? We've yet to see a democratic socialist state that lived up to both ends of the bargain.

Thursday Musings

An odd story out of Arizona, where an immigration hawk with some Nazi ties and his girlfriend's family were gunned down. The first prospect was domestic violence, for a gun-happy ex-Marine with his past would be a good candidate to go postal on loved ones (at least, we've seen stories like that before); however, if he has been making life somewhat miserable for drug gangs trying to operate there, having the Zetas or other narcos put a hit out on him would be feasible.

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Almost is odd is Washington state liberals wanting to coax Dennis Kucinich out west to run for one of two open seats. He lost to Marcy Kaptur in a dual-incumbant primary earlier this spring, as his western Cleveland district got shifted over into Kaptur's Toledo one; that was one of the undercards of the big Romney-Santorum Ohio primary day. He's got two weeks to move west if he wants to meet the May 18th deadline.

There's no rule that says how long you have to be a resident in order to run. However, I've yet to hear of a candidate who lost one primary, then changed states in the same year.

Would he be able to serve Ohio as a congressman while living in Washington state? Not that I'd lose any sleep if that seat went vacant for a few months as it goes into the dustbin of history.

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Newt finally hung 'em up. It was far from the worst campaign in primary history, contrary to some pundits thoughts. Phil Gramm's ready money campaign of 1996 likely retires that trophy.

However, it was unorthodox, and a last-man-standing effect put him in the lead after just about everyone else had a turn at the front and crashed in some way. He wasn't quite the last man standing, for Rick Santorum took advantage of Romney superPAC money savaging Newt to be the last non-Paulista standing before he became the target of unrelenting PAC-flak.

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While I was in grad school at Kent State, I worked in the southeastern Cleveland suburb of Macedonia for a few months. I likely went over the route 82 bridge just west of there a few times; five Occupiers got caught plotting to blow it up earlier in the week.

The FBI seemed to be on this quintet like white on rice, like they've rolled up some Muslim wannabe jihadists in the past well before they were dangerous. One only wonders if there are some savvier Occupiers who might actually pull off some terrorism before having someone on the FBI payroll become part of the group.

Midweek Musings

We've seen a few sports suicides as of late in both hockey and football, but none with the stature of Junior Seau, who apparently did himself in today. He was one of the best middle linebackers in NFL history. One can only wonder at this point if football-related brain damage helped his emotional spiral of the last few years along.

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Speaking of damage and linebackers, four current and former Saints players were suspended for their Bountygate misdeeds. Seau's counterpart on the Saints, Johathan Vilma, gets the year off. He might not quite be at Seau's level, but three Pro Bowls isn't anything to sneeze at.

Vilma is alledged to have helped finance the bounty pool with 10K of his own cash. Small change for modern football players, who have been known to "make it rain" more than that on a night on the town, but you don't pay people for creating injuries.

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Odd story out of Windsor, where they're getting a nastry hum that seems to be coming from the Michigan side of the Detroit river in River Rouge. Michigan officials have checked and can't find anything on this side of the border that matches the hum. The Canadian government has complained to the EPA and the State department, but they pass the buck to the Michigan DNR, who's struck out on its research.

I'm far from being an acoustic engineer, but if memory serves, sound waves can merge to do funky things, so that low-level sound waves that might be innocent on the US side could wind up merging on the other side of the border to do nasty things.

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Protests have ran off a gay foreign-policy expert from the Romney campaign. Richard Grenell was getting treated like Beowulf's nemesis Grendel by some theocons; Grenell resigned rather than be a drag on the campaign.

I'm not sure if that's the best message to send for the general election. Romney isn't treated warmly by social conservatives in the GOP, so throwing Grenell under the bus might have been seen as a sop to the right wing; I don't think it will help and will only make the Romney campaign look like more of a pup tent.

May Day Musings

The Greeks are having their parliamentary elections this week and their nativists are now being heard from as well.

Firmly on the fringe of the right since it first appeared 20 years ago, Golden Dawn garnered a meager 0.23 percent in the 2009 elections. Now, it looks set to easily win more than the 3 percent threshold needed to enter Parliament, with recent opinion polls showing support at about 5 percent.

The GD is a rather nasty bunch, with a logo that looks like a misdrawn swastika and a goon squad to match. That's going to make running things that much harder, since GD seems to be one of those toxic parties that mainstream parties of the right can't touch, thus leading to more grand coalitions that are less likely to make hard decisions.

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Barnes and Noble is spinning off its digital and college-bookstore arm and Microsoft is buying in for $300M. The dead tree side of the business is almost as dead as the trees and with B&N's Nook reader trailing the Amazon Kindle, a MS tie in should give them a boost-the next version of Windows is slated to come with a Nook reader ap built in.

There may well be a good reason for such a spin-off; what's getting kicked out of the nest would have more cache than the dead-tree side, and might result in the combination of Nook and dead-tree B&N getting a higher market cap than a combined firm.

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It's about a week old, but this story on some Google money going into asteroid mining is interesting. James Cameron, fresh off a trip to the bottom of the Marianas Trench is also helping finance and front the project for an industrialization of space-

The inaugural step, to be achieved in the next 18 to 24 months, would be launching the first in a series of private telescopes that would search for asteroid targets rich in resources. The intention will be to open deep-space exploration to private industry.

Within five to 10 years, however, the company expects to progress from selling observation platforms in orbit around Earth to prospecting services. It plans to tap some of the thousands of asteroids that pass relatively close to Earth and extract their raw materials.

Since this story came out near Earth Day, I was reminded of the old sticker-"Earth First... we'll exploit the other planets later." Their day for exploitation (in the good sense of being utilized) seems to be coming faster than you think.

One advantage to asteroid mining is that you have no NIMBY effect to worry about.

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Bad news for Sarkozy. Marine Le Pen is abstaining... courteously in the French run-off. The conventional wisdom and the polls have Francois Hollande, a somewhat centrist Socialist (by French standards, since "centrist Socialist" sounds like an oxymoron) leading going into Sunday's vote.

Friday Musings

Delmon Young seems to be told to be more like Kirk Gibson and wound up giving us Mel-

Police say Young was standing outside of the Hilton New York, not far from Times Square. A group of about four Chicago tourists staying there were approached by a panhandler wearing a yarmulke. As the group walked up to the hotel doors, Young started yelling anti-Semitic epithets. Police say it's not clear who he was yelling at, but he got into a tussle with one of the Chicago group, who sustained scratches to his elbows.

The man, 32, refused medical attention, New York detective Joseph Cavitolo told the Detroit Free Press.

Police were called, and Young was arrested. He was first hospitalized because he was believed to be intoxicated.

2:30AM and drunk; Coach Cal's line about nothing good happening at a bar at 2AM holds again. His brother Dmitri had substance-abuse issues that derailed his career with the Tigers and Delmon might not be far behind.

It will be interesting how long he gets suspended for and whether New York officials want to play hanging judge on this; having a Jewish mayor who makes more than the entire Tiger team won't help matters for Delmon.

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Shall we call them Bayou Boys the Sinners from now on? Or maybe the Nixons, after this wiretapping charge? If the latter, you could bring in Jake Plummer as a QB coach.

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Interesting news out of Toronto, where a major indoor stadium is being built in the northern suburbs; that has echos of the suburban Palace of Auburn Hills in Detroit to this Michigander, and a second NHL club has been posited as a possible client. However, the Rosemont Horizon in metro Chicago could be another analogy, where concerts, DePaul games and other events round out the schedule without the Bulls and Black Hawks moving out of Chicago proper.

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While mind's up in the Great White North, the student strike in Quebec is turning nasty, almost like France of 1968 is making a comeback. A less-than-popular Liberal government (which is the main party of the center-right with ex-Tory MP Jean Charest as premier) is trying to raise tuition and both teachers and students are up in arms. It likely won't get to 1968 levels where de Gaulle was almost forced from office via a student-inspired general strike, but it might get worse before getting better.

Midweek Musings

We can now figure out how the Secret Service got into trouble; they had the Justice Department help round up the ladies, led by the Solicitor General;-). Given that he can't seem to argue his way out of a paper bag, one can see how he might have butchered the a-la-Cartagena episode as well.

Serously, the Obama team seem to have taken it in the neck again in oral arguments on the Arizona immigration law, with even Sotomayor being skeptical of the idea that the feds should preclude state help in enforcing federal law; having the first Latina justice come down with the conservatives on this case would be a major coup.

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It looks like a playoff might be in the offing for college football; a four-team playoff is being looked at, with the BCS bowls possibly hosting the semifinals. The idea of having the higher-seeded teams host the semi-finals was chucked, since they would be leaving money on the table if a small-stadium team got there.

The idea that a team would not have enough hotelage to manage a playoff game doesn't quite hunt, since they are set up to fill the stadium 6-8 times a year in the regular season; what the smaller stadia lack is seats, so a 60K big-city dome will trump a 30K mid-major stadium.

I think an eight-team setup would work well, but you have to start somewhere, and a 4-team playoff is a good start.

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Speaking of college football, we're now seeing million-dollar assistants, as the Honey Badger's handler, defensive coordinator John Chavis, just got a $1.1M deal from LSU. For the money, for the glory and for the fun.... but mostly for the money.

That's as big of a head scratcher as John L Smith leaving a new job at Weber State to be a temp at Arkansas. Calling him a mercenary is an insult to soldiers of fortune, for mercenaries are supposed to stay bought and do their job. However, the temptation of a loaded team that could contend for a national title and have Smith in the shoes of Steve Fisher and get the job full time by winning a title as a temp.

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Cute story of a soccer ball that floated from Japan to Alaska post-tsunami; the guy who found the ball has a Japanese wife, who was able to read the writing on the ball and get it back to its owner in Japan.

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Wal-Mart's been busted for bribing officials in Mexico and trying to cover the misdeeds up. That's endemic in Mexico, as low salaries and a tradition of palm-greasing make it hard to do business by the book lead a lot of otherwise reputable firms to find their way to the dark side. Of course, Wally World's critics will make more hay out of it than they should, for the outrage over something will be correlated to the political mileage you can get out of the bad news.

Tuesday Musings

The northeast is not good terrain for conservatives, so today's package of primaries was tailor-made for Mitt Romney. Still, getting a majority of the vote across the board sends a "game over" message.

Newt was trying to win in Deleware but he went Noware, as he managed only 27%.

All hail the Dullest Man in The World-"I don't always drink chocolate milk, but when I do I prefer Over the Moon. Stay thirsty my friends." That's a real East-coast brand which Romney might well consume; that was new to me, since I haven't spent any time in their territory.

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Seven games for the Artest formerly known as Pacer. That means he'll be out for most of the first round against either Denver or Dallas if they stay in the third seed. That creates a problem, especially if they get the Mavs; they won't have MWP there to give Dirk fits on defence.

Speaking of World Peace, here's a nice Henry Abbott TrueHoop piece on the Dalai Lama and MWP. I took a Buddhism class at CMU to polish off my gen-ed reqirements; Abbott went to India and Tibet on a summer program at NYU in his college days.

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The guy who gave us the Gaia idea of the world as one big organism, James Lovelock, is ratcheting down the rhetoric on global warming; the data hasn't been matching the theory in the 21st century-

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

...

Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”

He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role.

“It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said.

He said he still thought that climate change was happening, but that its effects would be felt farther in the future than he previously thought.

“We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit,” Lovelock said.

Note that he's not gone to the "dark side", but he's honest about where the numbers are at. There are things here that will comfort both the AGW fans and the skeptics, but the skeptics are likely going to crow more than they should. I'd be interested to see what the Connexions folks think on this one.

This piece yesterday should give you a clue-"Hands up if you still think human beings can’t change the atmosphere." That should get few takes, but the questions of note are "by how much?" and "what should we do about it?"

 

Sunday Night Musings

This summer, Metta World Peace made a bad name for himself, and he did so again this afternoon, with a MMA-worthy elbow to James Hardin. The only problem is that it's the NBA and he got the rest of the afternoon off, and likely the rest of the regular season. That might be his last regular season game in a Laker uni, for he's a good candidate to have his contract amnestied, even if he doesn't get an amnesty for that cheap shot.

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On a sadder note, Chuck Colson passed on yesterday. His Watergate prison term gave him an infamy that he turned to good with a prison ministry that flowed from his conversion while locked up. It sounded like a less-than-legit foxhole conversion at the time, but he made it stick for almost four decades of witness and ministry. 

No one else is quite in the position Colson was to speak about those in prison; he'll be missed by his Prison Fellowship ministry and Christians in general.

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Orrin Hatch is going to have a primary, just missing the 60% at the Utah GOP convention that would have short-circuited a primary per Utah rules. He'll have to fend off Tea Party-friendly Dan Liljenquist in June.

At least Hatch gets a primary; conservatives were so POed with Bob Bennett's establishment streak two years ago that he came in third at the convention and didn't even get a slot in the primary. Hatch has had two years to mend fences and might be able to keep the TPers at bay.

I'm of two minds on that; running off the Hatches might fend off some center-left victories where folks like Hatch are lured over into bipartisan solutions, but a party where a 90% ACU guy gets the heave-ho is starting to turn into a pup tent if not a mere sleeping bag.

Tuesday Musings

The Motor City Madman went after the president...rhetorically. However, the rhetoric matches some of the union rhetoric of "taking out" Republicans in the fall. The difference is that one could more easily see Nugent and friends backing it up... but not to the point where you have to sic the Secret Service on him. If that's the case, one should have the Secret Service keeping tabs on Jimmy Hoffa 2.0 as well.

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Interesting piece on the few remaining Blue Dogs-redistricting has not been kind, seeing them either (a) put into more conservative districts (b) put in with another congressman or (c) getting primaried from the left.

Angus King might be one add to the Blue Dog roster as a center-left Mainer senator if he replaces Snowe White.

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The French vote on Sunday in their presidential election, and a hard-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is making a late move to break into the top two. President Sarkozy is in trouble, as most incumbents are in a shaky political environment; moderate-sounding Socialist Francois Hollande seems to be the early favorite, but Hollande might be too pragmatic for the left as they look at the prospect of big budget cuts in order to balance the books.

Much of the early press focused on Marine Le Pen, the second-generation National Front leader, capturing the nativist-populist vote, but left-populism might sell as well. One of the two might sneak into the top two; having them both make the top two would be a game-changer.

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Bad but expected news for Kentucky fans-the entire starting five is going pro. With sixth man Darius Miller graduating, about 95% of UK's minutes are gone, with only Kyle Wiltjer's 11 minutes a game returning of the seven guys in the regular rotation. The freshman crop better be good, for the cupboard is rather bare in Lexington.

Midweek Musings

We're at a point where we're looking at a big anti-trust case in the e-book market; Apple and a number of publishers were trying to move away from price competition by letting the publishers pick the price and let Apple and other e-book sellers take a set cut of that list price. Amazon was the target of their wrath, as they were starting to try and do their own publishing and take the current publishers out of the loop when they weren't driving prices down.

I haven't gotten into the E-book realm as of yet, but Eileen very much likes the Kindle she got for Christmas. It seems crisp-screened and fairly user-friendly; Eileen has been able to dig into the public domain section to review some of the classic lit of the 1800s along with the occasional modern book. It is a bit of a head-scratcher that we're that far along on this digital economy where the market is big enough to be worth gaming.

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Sadly, Rick Santorum hung 'em up yesterday. There's quite a bit of missed-it-by-that-much frustration that can be put to bed now. It's hard for a non-establishment candidate to get traction when he gets super-PACed into the ground by establishment money either twisting your record (if you have one) or bemoaning your lack of a record (if you're a political novice).

The good news for Santorum fans is that Romney was in this spot last go-round; the runner-up in the GOP race is often the front-runner the next go round (Reagan 76, Dole 88 and McCain 2000 are three other cases in point). However, that's a bit of cold comfort for now.

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The diplomats are trying to talk Syria into a cease-fire, but I don't see that working. At this point, the Assad team is only going to respond to hard power; any sanctions would get Russian vetoes and not be overly effective if the Russians stood down, so the diplomats are left with taunting Assad a second time.

Sunday Night Musings

Interesting day in sports, where we had a slugfest in Detroit, with the Tigers sweeping Boston with a 13-12 win in 11 innings; strangely, Duane Below is now 2-0, backing into wins in relief two days in a row. The Tigers needed a three-run homer from Miguel Cabrera in the 9th to force extra innings and needed a two-run walk-off homer from Alex Avila to win it after Boston took a 12-10 lead in the top of the 11th.

One interesting feature of the 11th was Prince Fielder gaming the Williams Shift (for dead-pull lefties-the shortstop plays on the other side of second and the third baseman plays the shortstop's spot) they had on, poking a single through the unmanned third base position. That proved to be the tying run.

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While I was watching the Tiger game, I heard a hoot come from upstairs where my folks were watching the Masters- Louis Oosthuizen had holed out his second shot on the par-5 second for the first double-eagle at the Masters since 1935. That put him in the lead, but he wound up losing in a playoff to Bubba Watson.

Watson might not quite be up to Seve Ballesteros' fame as a shot-maker, but his second shot at 10 in the playoff will rank up with the Spaniard's best magic tricks. Then there was Phil Mickelson's fiasco at 4, where he found himself deep in the jungle and took four shots to get to the green, taking a triple-bogey.

A neat day of sports between the Tigers and the Masters.

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On a less edifing note, NRO's veteran curmudgeon John Derbyshire let loose with a black-bashing essay on a paleocon site; he's now their former veteran curmudgeon.

The sad part of the "Derb" essay is that there are germs of truth there buried in ex-Anglican cynicism. Yes, that's a counter-stereotypes, that ex-Anglicans are the most cynical folks on the planet, narrowly edging out ex-Catholics. However, when you take God out of the mix, the lesser angles of our nature have more room to thrive.

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I missed this while on vacation-it seems like Alberta will be going to the polls on the 23rd, the writ having dropped back on March 26th. The polls have the Wildrose Alliance leading the ruling Conservatives, putting the Tea Party-esque bunch in position to take over Canada's most conservative province.

 

Vacation Musings

We're down visiting my in-laws this week, so my routine is near non-existant, except bringing my on-line tutoring work with me.

I did get to watch UK's run to the title last night and could loosely picture some of the post-game chaos in downtown Lexington after living in suburbia there for a couple of years; we were there long enough to catch the UK bug and see the beginning of the Calipari era before moving back to Midland.

What was intersting is that defense carried the day in that Anthony Davis was MVP with only six points. Sixteen rebounds, three steals, six blocks and five assists added to a busy evening for the soon to be rich young man.

I'm not as jaded as some over the one-and-dones that make a single-season pit-stop in the Bluegrass on their way to the NBA; that's how the system works. Good coaches attract good players and good players often don't stay long. Yes, UMass and Memphis got busted during Cal's watch, but those were a result of said good players getting shady people hanging on to them rather than any action of Calipari that I can tell.

UK will likely lose their entire front line and probably Teague at the point. Lamb could use a junior year to blossom as a combo guard that would command a lottery pick; he'd be a late first rounder if he went now. Darius Miller will likely be in a NBA camp this fall as well and Wiltjer will likely come off of an NBA bench later this decade, but not now.

That leaves UK with Lamb, Wiltjer and the next crop of seasonal labor to go through freshman orientation next fall. However, Calipari has a way of reloading rather than rebuilding.

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Dick Cheney had a heart transplant; that comes as news to folks on the left, who thought he didn't have one to replace. It does remind me of a Doonesbury story-line a few decades back where a conservative got a liberal's heart (how could they tell?-they pulled the donor from a Volvo crash) and saw the recipient start evolving leftward. Fat chance here.

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Odd story out of Oakland at a Korean Christian college; a former student went postal and killed seven. That reminds me of a story a few years ago where a YWAM dropout shot up a facility in Colorado and then was killed trying to shoot up Ted Haggard's old church.

Going to a Christian school isn't an instant cure for emotional problems, even with Oikos' interesting mix of east and west, bringing traditional Asian healing tricks into the Western mix. Sometimes folks who don't get better in that setting feel more pressure to get with the program and can blow up in a variety of directions, one of which is to go out with guns blazing.

The shooter turned himself in; too often, those cases end with the shooter either killing themselves or being killed by police and/or security (the YWAM case ended with a lady security guard plugging the shooter). Needless to say, Mr. Goh needs some prayers, as does the school and Goh's victims.

 

Tuesday Musings

Blackened Tuna, anyone? The Saints are in the funky spot of looking for a temp head coach while Sean Payton sits out the year for Bountygate, and Bill Parcells is the name on top of the rumor list. Somehow, the thought of Payton hiring his temp looks like a mom in hospice care looking for new parents in advance, except without the hankies (since he doesn't get much if any sympathy.

One league source told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter on Monday night that he would be "shocked" if Parcells took the Saints job, largely because he likely would have to wait five more years to be eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame if he returned to coaching.

At the level of acclaim that Parcells is at, he doesn't need a formal spot in Canton to be respected.

What's interesting is that the Saints are willing to take the PR hit to take Payton back after his suspension; it would indicate that they think he was overcharged. There is something to the thought that bounties have been part of the game on a small scale, usually a "Smith roughed up our guy last time we met, X dollars to the guy who sends Smith out on a stretcher" ad-hoc level. The Saints both did it on a ongoing basis and got caught in a more PC era for the NFL.

Given that you were trying to hurt people rather than have it merely be a byproduct of hard-nosed play, the Saints are lucky not to have RICO charges up on them. If this were the NCAA, Payton would have a three-year show-cause fatwa on him.

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The "Obamacare" case is getting heard at the Supreme Court and Anthony Kennedy seems ready to toss it out. I'd like to see at least one of the liberal bloc come on board to make it seem less of a right-left decision. That will likely be the biggest case since the 2000 election case and possibly bigger, since a ruling for the health care law will expand government's allowable scope and a ruling against it will set firmer limits on what the federal government an do.

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I haven't weighted in on the Trayvon case yet. It would look like (1) Mr Zimmerman oversteped his role (2) finding the right punishment, if any, is a thankless task (3) quite a few folks have got Zimmerman pre-hung as a personification of The Man and (4) CNN and other MSM outlets went over-the-top making this case a top-burner issue.

That doesn't mean that wrong was not done here, but Trayvon has gone from being a dead black teen in a hoodie to being a personification of black youth, troubled but worthy of respect and life nonetheless; Trayvon the icon has trumped the real person behind the icon. I have a feeling that some of the Trayvon brigade will be walking back some words a la the Duke lacrosse case, but I'm also not ready, like some on the right are doing, of making Zimmerman a hero.

Midweek Musings

Tebow's cheaper than the Aint's bounty program; it cost the Aint's two second-rounders, Sean Payton the 2012 season and the Commander Bligh of the USS Bounty, former Aints DC Gregg Williams, is out indefinitely.

That's about right, but I'd think Williams would be up for something along the lines of 2-3 years of exile. They'll review after a year, but if Payton gets only a year, it's hard to see Williams, who was running the program, getting the same.

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An Algerian al Qaeda backer has been identified as the Jewish school shooter and has been cornered by the French police. He now gets to extend his 15 minutes of fame if the media lets him.

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Miguel Cabrera broke a bone under the eye courtesy of a wicked hop at third; from what the savants are saying, it wasn't Cabrera rust at third that caused it. It was a bad hop that personifies the term "the hot corner" that would have put any third-baseman in the hospital.

Hopefully, he'll heal up in time for opening day. There doesn't seem to be any vision or concussion issues, just stitches and the small fracture. Sunglasses helped cushion the blow, which could have been a lot worse were he out there au natural.

The Idyls of March

We're having one of those premature-spring day where we've hit 70 in Michigan. Of course, you have to wear shorts, or, like the buff youth walking past the restaurant just now, wearning nothing but shorts. The fans are on at my pizza joint, likely for the first time this calander year.

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I didn't do any post-redneck-primary blogging, but Tuesday was a good day. Newt was shut out of any southern wins that might give him credibility as a viable candidate going forward. Barring some major blow-up from either campaign, the path to seeing a GOP convention turing to Newt is rather limited.

He does have a following of economic conervatives who want something less establishmentarian than Romney and something less preachy than Santorum (and something a few parsecs closer to Earth than Paul). Those of use of a certian age will fondly remember Newt from his speaker days; others of that same certain age will view him as the Devil's henchman, complete with the morals of an alley cat.

Hence, ain't gonna happen, Newton. Almost, but not quite.

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Good news for Detroit fans-Megatron reupped with a megadeal-$132 million. He still have a year to go before free agency, but he had a big cap number for this season, so the Lions locked him in early.

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The Tigers finally didn't tie, winning one in the 10th after having three 10-inning ties. 9-1-3 look like a soccer record.

Monday Moanin'

Here's some progress in the world. El Salvador is having elections and the conservative Arena party is poised to get a plurality of the seats with the ruling leftists coming a close second. Since they have a presidential system, we have the prospect of divided government.

That's better than the 70s and 80s, when Arena backers would hire goon squads to kill leftists (or folks they thought were of the left) as the left took to the hills in a civil war; now the left is in the presidency.

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Odd story out of Iraq, where some youngsters have taken up a goth-like meme, rebelling against local Muslim culture; that's gotten a few "emos" a bad case of lead poisioning from traditionalists who aren't above killing infidels.

I'm thinking of the bus scene from Star Trek 3, where a punker is defiantly blaring the eternal classic I Hate You on his boom box (thank the Lord for iPods to save us from the modern dreck in public places); Spock give him his Vulcan nerve pinch to KO him and turns off the noise, getting a sitting O from the rest of the people on the bus. Americans don't go to the point of thinking such youth need killin', but one can see where a culture where jihad is a valid option might go for the kill at their native punks.

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That was the movie where Kirk described Spock as doing too much LDS in the 60s. A guy who really was into LDS in the 60s (doing a mission tour in France in the late 60s) is poised to win Mississippi tomorrow. Rassumssen had Romney up eight while PPP has him down to Newt by 2. There aren't too many Mormons in Rebel territory, but the Casino Coast might have a few more-secular folks than the Squirrel Revival image might invoke; former Gov. Barbour has endorsed Romney, which might help.

It's probably do-or-die time for Newt as a serious player. If he wins both Alabama and MS, he has some bragging rights and can bring a large block of Southern delegates to Tampa. If he loses both (even close calls), he'd be hard pressed to go forward and see his backers peel off to either Romney or Santorum. If he wins one and loses the other in a squeaker, he'll likely be cocky enough to muddle on.

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Welcome to a US nightmare in Afghanistan, where a soldier went rogue and killed 16 civilians. No word as to why as of yet and no violent protest has been reported. The lack of backlash is interesting; when a threat to burn a Koran in Florida gets a murderous response, an actual slay ride by a US soldier gets crickets chirping by comparison.

If this gets the responce it could easily get, we might need to pack our bags and get in the practice of Preditor-droning the Taliban from a distance rather than try to build a country that can provide a viable alternative to a harsh jihadish theocracy.