Ants In His Pants For The Motherland

Martin Horat is a genuine weather prophet, according to the Swiss tourism office. And this is a genuine ad promoting tourism. Hat tip to copyranter.

Reeding South Carolina Evangelicals' Minds

Ralph Reed, the evangelical Christian Republican consultant, minimizes anti-Mormonism when it comes to Mitt Romney. LA Times:

His campaign has mailed brochures to South Carolina voters that feature a color photo of a prayerful Romney in coat and tie, his head bowed and eyes closed, along with a signed pledge to be true to "my faith" as president. The brochure notes that he has belonged to the same church "his entire life." But it does not mention his Mormon faith, a barrier for some Protestant evangelicals who don't consider Mormons to be Christians.

Reed...said that Mormonism was less of a factor this year.

In Iowa, exit polls showed 61% of caucus-going Protestant evangelicals voted for either a Mormon (Romney) or a Catholic (Santorum or Gingrich). Reed said Christian fundamentalists were voting on "electability, likability, who shares their values" and the economy, especially in this hard-hit state.

"The sort of lazy narrative is that they're driven by identity politics, and all you have to do is come in here and say, 'Praise the Lord' and quote scripture, and they're going to vote for you. It's not true," Reed said.

A Tory For Obama, Again

Andrew Sullivan makes the case for Barack Obama's re-election. Since the election's likely to be (or had better be) decided on the basis of which candidate has the better chance of boosting GNP growth and getting Americans back to work, here's Sullivan's argument on the economy:

When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. Economies take time to shift course.

But Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.

All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

Romney, Reform, Or Re-Reagan?

Was Jon Huntsman, who ended his campaign today and endorsed Mitt Romney, not ready for the Republican Party, or the other way around? "BuzzFeed":

The party Huntsman imagined -- modernizing, reforming, and youthful -- could still be born. That might be the reaction to a second smashing defeat at Obama's hands, or that might be where President Romney takes his re-election campaign. But it's now hard to see Huntsman leading that change. He bet, too early, on a fantasy, and ran for the nomination of a party that doesn't exist, at least not yet. His decision tonight to drop out just marks his recognition of that fact.

The second hypothetical, in which a President Romney maneuvers the party toward the center, is the worst nightmare of tea party and social conservatives. As president, Romney would likely marginalize the right with business-friendly, relatively moderate policies appealing to a congressional coalition of center-right Republicans and centrist Democrats. If you add anti-Mormon evangelicals to the mix, some predict that Romney's nomination would portend one of those fabled general elections when conservatives stay home.

"BuzzFeed" thinks an Obama win might trigger a Republican Reformation. But conservative bigwigs who may choose to give Romney faint support in 2012 would be aiming not to reform but re-Reagan. If Romney lost, they would continue to militate for someone more worthy to wear the pompadour in 2016. Four years ago, prominent strategist Ed Rollins hinted that a John McCain loss would at least give the GOP the advantage of returning to its Goldwater-Reagan roots. I have no doubt that this magical thinking will persist indefinitely among conservatives even though Americans elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 strictly because he wasn't Jimmy Carter. A far-right Republican won't ever win an election because she's far right, only because the country's in a ditch and she happens to be on the scene with a tow truck.

Calculating politicos are one thing. Would substantial numbers of actual right-wing voters spurn Romney in hopes of making sure that a Manchurian moderate doesn't become the de facto king of conservatism? Like most second terms, Obama's would be uneventful on the domestic policy front while he grappled with the coming storm over Iran and pushed for progress on Palestine. The tactical voter might construe this as the perfect opportunity to repair to the lab to work some more on Reaganstein. I just don't know very many people who actually think that way when they vote. Do you? Part of being an American is letting the parties do their best or worst and then pulling the lever in November, holding your nose if necessary.

That would make Romney's nomination an historic event in itself. From the tea party to Fox News, conservatives have never been as vocal or well organized, and yet they're on the verge of a massive failure. We may debate about who the real Romney is. I believe he's a diligent and relatively enlightened guy who fudged what he believes about abortion, gay rights, and the role of government in order to survive the Republican fire swamp. His alternatives were not running and switching parties. In any event, neither he nor Obama will be able to evade his record in the general election. Dare we hope for a substantive national conservation between serious people?

The GOP, Nixon, And "The Whole People"

Writing in the Jan. 23 New Yorker about the state of the GOP, Jeffrey Frank raises the ghost of the last winning Republican to endorse moderation for moderation's sake:

In 1959, Vice President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.” Ten months before the general election, the increasingly angry, suspicious, and divided party of Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry seems ever more immersed in its current orthodoxies. None of the candidates, though, seem the least bit interested in even addressing how they, or their party, might actually govern the “whole people” of a fractious nation.

The Second To The Last Unanswered Question

I was thinking about the fetal position this morning, because I realized I was in it while stealing an extra five minutes in bed. My knees were pressed together and tucked up and my wrists crossed against my chest. I wondered if my 57-year-old body actually remembered being in my mother's womb. I briefly considered working this into my sermon and then thought better of it. But I remained curious.

On-line, I learned this:

A whopping 41% of participants [in a survey] sleep in this curled-up manner. Women are twice as likely to rest like this and it is listed as the most common position. These sleepers are said to have a tough exterior but are still sensitive and may appear to be shy but warm up quickly.

And this (at a great website, 1000 Awesome Things):

The fetal position is the best way to keep warm if you find yourself tentless in Nunavut or crashing on a pal’s basement floor without copious blanketing. It literally warms the heart (liver, lungs, and kidneys). And hey, isn’t the fetal position just one more way to turn back the clock? After all, your body knows the fetal position, [and] your body lived the fetal position...

Plus this:

The fetal position has been observed in drug addicts, who enter the position when experiencing withdrawal. Sufferers of anxiety are also known to assume the fetal position during panic attacks.

But type this question into Google, with quotation marks, and you get no hits: "Do our bodies remember being in the fetal position?"*

*This statement is now inoperative, because if you enter the sentence, you will now be referred to The Episconixonian. We also star in this search: "Aunt Edna's Prayer".

A California Moderate

David Stockman, President Reagan's first budget director, said the so-called Reagan revolution never happened. He increased taxes and the size of the federal government. Experts quoted in this NPR piece wonder if today's GOP would nominate him. Imagine what conservatives vying to be top non-Ron would say about a California moderate (by today's measure) with a skeleton like this waiting to be let out of the closet:

In 1978, Reagan campaigned against a referendum in California called Proposition 6 that would have banned gays and lesbians, and possibly anyone who supported gay rights, from working in the state's public schools.

The bill was supported by the Christian right and sponsored by state legislator John Briggs. The measure failed, and Briggs later said it was solely because of Reagan.

You Think?

"Sinking Cruise Ship Raises Safety Questions" -- headline at ABCnews.com. Five are reported dead and 17 missing.

"Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory"

The peroration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech, on April 3, 1968 in Memphis

NOAA? Right.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for linking to my post about Obama dissing Nixon.