It's nearly official. Santorum won Louisiana with 48% to 27% for Romney. He's declared that he'll stay in the race and something like "I'm not running for the conservative nomination--I AM THE CONSERVATIVE candidate in this race." I find that not only a stretch, and a smear of Mitt Romney, but an insult to every conservative who voted for Mitt. I hope it drives him down in the polls. He's getting too big for his britches.

It's been a tedious day between the Trayvon Martin case being raised to a cause celebre by the President saying "it should be a time of soul searching for us all," as if if were a societal decision to kill this young man. And saying he looked like a son Obama might have had, apropos of absolutely nothing, but capable of inciting a lot of silly consclusions. Outside of this, we've been listening to Santorum's self-destruction, followed by his angry attempts to blame it on Mitt Romney. Forget it Rick, it's politics. You gave it a good shot, but came up short. You should be closing this out gracefully instead of making Mitt you be'te noir. The real enemy is Obama and if you can't even admit that Romney would be immeasurably better, you ought to shut up for awhile. You're looking foolish.

I don't follow the Solyndra saga closely, but it seems that the White House was giving a whole lot of effort to keep from being embarrassed. Someone should ask, "If you wanted to wanted to invest in venture capitalism, would you choose Bain Captital or the Federal Government?" If a bank took depositors money and sunk it into Solyndra, it would be grounds for a fiduciary malfeasance suit or the like. The Government should not be our investment manager. Governor Romney, feel free to use that line.

Well, SOMEBODY appreciates Foehner's gaffe.

ABC reports:

Rick Santorum played off of the Mitt Romney campaign’s Etch A Sketch gaffe today when he told an audience that the country might be better off with President Obama than with a candidate who will shift his positions with ease and who he believes is not very different from the president. “You win by giving people a choice. You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future,” Santorum told a crowd at USAA.

Mitt's response: ""I was disappointed to hear that Rick Santorum would rather have Barack Obama as president than a Republican." This jumping on gaffes game works both ways.

I've been ordering all the old '50s sf movies I can get from Netflix. The last two were "Rocket Ship X-M" featuring a very young Lloyd Bridges, with a plot so inane that you wonder if the writer finished high school. It begins as a trip to the moon with the rocket heading straight up then making a 90 degree turn to head to the moon. None of that silly orbiting for our heroes. Somehow the ship gets off course and heads to Mars, by incredibly lucky change. There's no mention of where the extra fuel and air came from, but they get there and land only to find an ancient civilization destroyed by war, leaving only stone-age hostile troglodytes. They lose two or three crew members but get back to the ship and take off to earth. This time, their navigation is better and they are able to contact Earth when they get back, but they have insufficient fuel to land and end up destroying their rocket ship. Apparently all the people in the 1950s weren't too sanguine about exploring space. Now I'm watching Flight to Mars, from 1951, statrring Cameron Mitchell and Arther Franz. This time the rocket is aimed at Mars and hits its mark, literally, in a crash landing. The ideas of space flight are wonderful; no space suits, not even uniforms. Earth women have calf length skirts, but they encounter a developed civilization on Mars which welcomes them but withholds it's intentions to follow them back and take over Earth. The Mars women dress like WWII pin-ups, with dress that barely cover their buttocks. There's a romantic triangle with a lady scientist in unrequited love with Arthur Franz. Cameron Mitchell is a reporter invited along for the ride who senses at once what the situation and is drawn to the lady scientist himself. Meanwhile Franz's character meets a Mars maiden and falls in love. She leaks the secret plans of the Martian leaders, but is reluctant to return with the earth men. Instead one of the Martians sends his daughter, Franz's sweetie, to go back and develop trade relations between the two planets, while he remains behind to overthrow the hostile ruling group who wants to invade Earth. Mitchell keeps working on the lady scientist, played by Virginia Huston, and they develop a romance. Meanwhile the plan to leave with Alita (Marguerite Huston) the Martian babe is discovered and she and her father are taken aboard and the ship takes off as the Martians try to stop them. As you can see the second is actually not too bad in terms of a plot. It was produced by Walter Mirisch and despite typical campy effects and sets, the story makes it tolerable, with all the amusing fallacies believed by 1950s writers. It also features an interview with Cameron Mitchell from something called Sinister Image which discusses some of the old drive-in flicks he had made, such as Nightmare in Wax and the rest of his career. He was very good in Flight to Mars and reminds one of Captain Kirk and Kirk Douglas. One wonders why his career didn't take off. Probably because he got cast in a series of heavies parts and some bad horror films. Now I want to see Gorilla at Large.

I've been posting comments at other sites and forget to mention them on my own blog. Today, an adviser to Mitt Romney implied that Romney's claims of being conservative are just applicable for the primaries and will be "reset" and erased like an Etch-A-Sketch" for the general campaign. These people seem to be oblivious to the major criticism of Romney by skeptical conservatives, that he's a flip flopper and not a true conservative. The gaffe has been buzzing on Twitter, but it couldn't have come at a worse time, just after the victory in Illinois made it clear that he is going to be the nominee, this gives his opponents new breath to their major claim that he's a phony. I've never believed that claim, by the way, and it makes me angry and frustrated that an aide, a "media consultant" to boot, would go out and blurt something this stupid to CNN. Even though this wasn't Romney's personal gaffe, it gets attributed to him and intentionally misinterpreted and sets back a lot of progress he had made in winning conservatives over. Now, they'll support him, but grudgingly with a sense that we have no other choice. Santorum and Gingrich are gleefully using Etch-A-Sketchs as props and passing them around to reinforce their charges that they, not Romney, are the "real" conservatives. The problem with tearing down Romney this way, is that it doesn't establish them as superior candidates. If they were, they'd be ahead, and it's no excuse that they were outspent. These two especially are so jealous and ambitious that they've lost any sense of caring about the good of the party. If they can't have it, they'll do all they can to weaken the nominee. And it really demonstrates how personal their animus has become, largely because Romney is so much better funded and able to outspend them. But whose fault is that? They knew from the start that they were underfunded and under-organized. They didn't even get on the ballot in Virginia and Santorum didn't field a full slate of delegates in Illinois and Ohio. It reminds me of the lines from a Warren Zevon song, Boom Boom Mancini:

Some have the speed and the right combinations, If you can't take the punches, it don't mean a thing.. . . They made hypocrite judgments after the fact, But the name of the game is be hit and hit back

If you join a campaign in which you're not organized and well funded, you have no complaint if you get outspent. That's always been the way with politics. Sometimes, you get a charismatic candidate like Obama who can be sold because he's something new, but he was also exceptionally well-funded and well organized. I've lost a lot of respect I once had for Santorum as his mask of affability and selflessness has slipped and a desperate need to win his way back to power has emerged. His basic need to impose his values on others has emerged and hurt him.

SCOTUS smacks down EPA's outrageous abuse of power And it was a unanimous ruling. We're all cheering, but it has to be asked why, when this was such a no-brainer. Basically, the EPA was denying the Sacketts the right to take their case to court without risking huge daily fines. It was essentially blackmail against challenging the agency's ruling which was absurd on its face. The main question we should all be asking is why this had to go to the Supreme Court to get overturned.

Jeb Bush endorses Romney Now, if he could just get Bobby Jindal.

Mitt wins big in Illinois He gave a good speech, too. Emphasizing economic freedom as the source of prosperity, he said,

“This president doesn’t understand the genius of the American economy. The American economy is fueled by freedom. History has shown that freedom has consistently lifted people out of poverty.” [Italics mine] “It is not the government that creates prosperity. Prosperity . . . is the product of free markets and free people.“

Mark Steyn

But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn’t as “forward-looking” as a 21st-century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy, 1940s British health-care reforms, 1930s New Deal–sized entitlements premised on mid-20th-century birth rates and life expectancy, and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody’s seen since the Weimar Republic. If that’s not a shoo-in for Mount Rushmore, I don’t know what is.

They can call themselves "progressive" but they seem to end up repeating the same mistakes with the bullheadedness of the ignorant.