New Hampshire

Well-Dressed 2x4 Wins with Less than Forty Percent; Dotty Grandpa comes in Second, Boring Guy Gets Third; Death Struggle Between Degenerate Troll and Horse-Faced Hypocrite for Fourth

Yes, the New Hampshire Presidential primary is over.

Mitt Romney won - but of course he had to; the Granite State was his backyard. If he lost in NH, he might as well go to Salt Lake City and hang up his Magic Mormon Underwear. But with 95% of the vote counted, he's only got 39.4%. Not a good showing.

Still, he's the first Republican since Gerald Ford to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, so that's got to count for something. We have to remember that Ford lost, though.

Ron Paul lived up to his supporter's faith in him as America's Blithering Grandfather and showed a strong second, about ten percentage points behind Romney.

John Huntsman posted third, and I believe one guy felt his speech was greeted with a decided lackluster amount of enthusiasm.

That left Newton Gingrich and Rick Santorum duking it out for the fourth-place position. That's not even a podium finish, guys, and only about 200 votes separate you two. Pathetic, even more than usual.

Rick Perry? You ask.

Do I have to?

::sigh:: Okay.

Perry got 1709 votes, managing a sick fifth (if we assume that The Newt and Frothy Mix are statistically tied at fourth). But like a scabies infection or a case of herpes, Perry refuses to go away.

On to South Carolina, and we see just how much damage the Palmetto State can inflict on Mitt Romney's doomed campaign.

Giving the Finger to the GOP

Last year the Congress passed a bill establishing a protection board for consumers, designed to act as a watchdog over the loan sharks who are currently running the nation's banks, credit card companies and payday loan shops. The President signed it into law over the objections of the Republican caucus.

The GOP hatched a cunning plan: They would block every attempt by the President to nominate a head of this board. This would, in effect, nullify the law.

At the same time, the need was urgent to name three more members of the National Labor Relations board. And, sure enough, every time a name was put forward the GOP Senate Caucus would filibuster it. This paralyzes the NLRB, since they only had two members and couldn't make any binding decisions (a quorum was required, at least three members).

Stymied by the intransigence of the GOP, President Obama waited.

Until yesterday.

Exercising his authority under Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution (the supreme law of the land, just to remind you), President Obama made four recess appointments - the head of the CFPB and three members of the NLRB. I think they start on Monday.

The GOP is foaming at the mouth at this, but you have to recall that Obama's a Constitutional lawyer by education and training, so in this case I think he's on safe ground here. You can expect a lot of screeching about "abuse of power" and "power grab" and "ignoring the Congress," but the crux of it is this:

If the GOP wants to actually work and earn their pay, they need to stop their mulish and quite frankly infantile behavior.

Bachmann Drops Out

Pyrrhic Victory for Romney in Iowa; Santorum Fluffers Come Out in Force

The Iowa Caucus is now history.

After too many debates to count and a mega-avalanche of ads and pontifications from various members of the chattering class, the voters finally had their say. Twenty-five convention delegates were up for grabs.

As of now, Willard Romney won - by eight votes - but didn't manage to break 25% of the electorate. It's not surprising; Mitt's been unable to break 25% for a year now. To win by only eight votes after spending about $156 per vote must be particularly painful.

Rick Santorum experienced a late surge, and started spending big up to the wire. In terms of percentages he finished equal to Romney, with an equal number of delegates allocated (eleven). At an estimated $21 per vote, he did rather well.

Ron Paul came away with three delegates, coming in third. He still thinks he has a chance, the poor deluded dope.

Newt Gingrich was fourth, getting no delegates and moving on to New Hampshire after a rather bitter and mean-spirited concession speech. He's made no bones about his loathing of Romney, although he also conceded he would "probably" vote for him in the general.

Rick Perry spent the most ($480) per vote, and only got 10% of the votes cast. He's gone back to Texas to "reassess" his campaign. Cain did the same, and hasn't been back.

Michele Bachmann got six thousand votes, and is still in the race (for now).

John Huntsman, tied with Buddy Roemer as the sanest of the GOP field, finished behind Bachmann. John, the Republicans don't want sane this cycle, my lad.

"No Preference" and "Other" beat out Cain and Roemer.

What was pretty gut-wrenching was watching MSNBC's Morning Joe and hearing the almost cloying chatter from Scarborough, et. al. about Santorum's victory speech. Unfortunately, Rick Frothy Mixture resonates with people who think social causes are the most important issues, when it's the economy, stupid.

So, onward to New Hampshire and Romney's back yard. We'll have to see if there's such a thing as Mitt-mentum.

And We're Off And Running!

Welcome to 2012!

And ... we have the Iowa Caucus on Tuesday.

Shit.

Coupled with that, we also had a 7-magnitude earthquake hit Tokyo. No report of damage. There was also a 4-magnitude tremor two miles northwest of Youngstown, Ohio that may or may not have had anything to do with fracking.

I tried to augur the omens and portents, but screw it.

I'm hoping that the caucus goers at Iowa voting places are bringing moist towelettes and soap with them, just in case the santorum surge washes over them. A frothy mixture like that can be ... messy.

Bear in mind, also, that Iowa actually has a fairly lackluster record when it comes to picking the eventual nominee. Remember that they picked Huckabee in the last go-around, a Pat Robertson came second in 88 as I recall.

Bachmann's already forecasting a miracle. Ho, ho. I think the miracle will be whether her campaign staff can stop her from immolating herself when the returns come in.

Adieu, 2011

Goodbye, the two thousand eleventh year of the Common Era.

You won't exactly be missed.

Onward!

The Closing of the Year

Shenanigans in the Middle East

The year's closing out with a rumble over in that part of western and southwestern Asia we like to call 'the Middle East.'

Cases in point:

If it's late December, you know you're going to see a brouhaha at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. As usual, it was the Greek Orthodox versus the Armenian Catholics, and brooms were involved. Riot police wielding batons were called out, but no arrests - these are, after all, men of the cloth and servants of the Prince of Peace, you know.

In the waters off the Red Sea coast of Yemen earlier this month an underwater volcano erupted, creating a new island. Neat, eh?

Israel saw protests against the ultra-ultra-orthodox Haredis, who are what you might want to call Jews on Steroids. They're advocating strict segregation of the sexes and what they call "proper" dress for women - sort of like the hijab or burqa, I should imagine. A ten-year-old girl was highlighted by one story; she's been harassed and called a slut and prostitute for dressing, you know, normally.

Iran, as you might have heard, may be trying to develop a nuclear weapon. In order to coerce them into not fiddling about with fissiles, Europe and the United States are threatening to set up an oil embargo, preventing Iran from selling oil. The Islamic Republic retaliated by staging naval maneuvers and stating quite baldly that they could close the vital Straits of Hormuz, which supplies about a third of the world's oil.

We take such things seriously, and the Pentagon said that we won't tolerate a closure of the Straits. We might move the Fifth Fleet in that direction, but I think they should step carefully - a US war game several years ago resulted in the opposing force sinking one of our aircraft carriers.

Shit got real for Arab League observers in Syria. They were there to monitor and investigate allegations that the Assad regime was slaughtering thousands of its own citizens in an attempt to stifle a reform movement. One team member said he saw "nothing frightening," which made me wonder if Sergeant Schultz hadn't married a nice Syrian girl after the War.

Riots are still going on in Egypt, where the people who ran out the Mubarak regime are still there, and the people would very much like them to leave, please, so they can rebuild a democratic government.

Iraq? What amazes me is they waited four whole days after we left to start things going.

We're selling F-15 air superiority fighters to Saudi Arabia. Merry Christmas, King Abdullah.

Going to be a fun year ...