I've always thought Ron Paul sounded nutty, but now he's looking shifty as all get out. I have a number of relatives who seem smitten with his libertarian, conspiracy theory patter, but I don't think they've looked into his dishonesty about the newsletters he published in the early 1990s and the repellent opinions and statements contained in them.

What fiasco? I have no objections to the position of House Republicans in the payroll tax bill. Frankly, the fiasco is on the part of Obama and the Senate Democrats who claim to be interested in stimulating job growth, but are blocking the Keystone Pipeline with the flimsy excuse of needing more time to work out a compromise. The payroll tax cut is a mirage, since shortfalls will have to be paid from taxes or just borrowed. If the Democrats really want to pass something, the House has already passed a bill. They only need to appoint conferees. The Wall Street Journal editorial board are not helping matters by belittling the GOP. Its editorial is helping Obama's cause.

Taxpayers subsidize Chevy Volts to the tune of $250,000 per vehicle. This should be grounds for driving Democrats, The UAW and all environmentalists out of Washington on a rail, then sue them to recover the money.

Heh. The ABR conservatives are having to be dragged kicking and screaming to the conclusion that Romney is the best candidate the GOP has. He can beat Obama, but the conservative blogosphere is already making liberal arguments against him, i.e. that Bain & Company and Bain Capital put many people out of work (despite saving and creating many, many more.) That kind of criticism makes me wonder who should be branded as a RINO here. Making anti-capitalist attacks on a fellow Republican is a strong indicator that it's you who's a RINO. Romney is not exactly Chainsaw Al. If supporting Mitt makes you a RINO, then I'm proud to be a Rubin-Haley-Christie-Coulter RINO. But I think we're the ones really in touch with our conservative GOP roots here.

The death of Christopher Hitchens brought me to muse. What if there's only an afterlife for those who expect one? Interesting implications, if true, but I believe in God and that he sent us here for a purpose, and that everybody who had the courage to make the jump into mortality will be raised into immortality.

The Washington Examiner endorses Romney.

Occupy Wukan. Protests in China get the kind of benign government response we've come to expect from the ChiComs.

Kim Jong-Dead? He was Il for all of his life.

Hmmm. I've been noticing a lot of remarks about Romney's remark that Gingrich is unreliable and "zany." So I looked up the word, and found: "Zany is currently in the top 1% of lookups and is the 2#1 most popular word on Merriam-Webster.com." I've begun double checking definitions in my incipient dotage, and found that zany was not a good word to describe Gingrich unless you wanted to imply that he's a buffoon. That's now how I would think Mitt thinks of him, because it suggests that he is being deliberately clownish to get laughs. If one equates zany with being a little nuts, that might be in order, as it would for Ron Paul who hasn't been able to bring his political views up to date since at least the 1930s, when the GOP was isolationist, along with most of the nation. Newt is crazy like a fox, though, and he's capitalizing on the fact that conservatives hate the news media and, for the time being, have been brainwashed to hate Mitt Romney. His ability to refer to recondite historical points lets him get away with a lot of nonsense that conservatives would normally laugh to scorn. If you think Obama's bullet train envy is goofy, one would assume that the idea of building mirrors in space to light earth's night side or moon bases to mine materials would seem beyond our reach as well, but Newt can advocate such things because he is Not-Mitt, which seems to be a litmus test for the GOP this year. It's as though they'd rather have 4 more years of Obama than support Romney.

Dangerous is the word I would use. Doug Mataconis on Gingrich's assault on the judiciary correctly points out how terrible such powers would be in the hands of Obama. Conservatives believe in being responsible.