Verrry loose recap, will likely update this tomorrow.

Big Winner: Mike Huckabee - played to the SoCon base quite well, some non-answers about his FairTax ideas (possibly to avoid scaring mainstream GOP’ers from conflating him with Ron Paul. As far as Iowa and possibly South Carolina are concerned, this has boosted him to top-tier candidate status.

Honourable Mentions: John McCain for making sure to tell us that he will keep the Ronaldus Magnus Reagan’s stylus close by to veto any and all pork. Also, after a few salvos traded with Dr. Ron Paul over pulling out the troops, I think McCain’s Glare of Doom™ was indicative of the MASSIVE well of self-control he was exercising to prevent himself from walking a couple-three steps over to Dr. Paul’s podium and slapping the living daylights out of him for uttering such foolish, isolationist pablum - effectively reducing our troops’ service to a meaningless sacrifice.

Downer Point: He did give some shifty answers when challenged about shamnesty.

Disappointing: CNN commentary dedicated toward painting Fred as irrelevant. That said, Fred REALLY needs to start picking apart the apparent frontrunners, especially Mitt for his flip-flopping and Clintonesque question evasion, and Mike Huckabee for his large-scale, high tax, nanny-statist do-gooder approach (i.e. fiscal liberalism). Fred’s performance wasn’t bad at all, although he seems to be learning the game: keep coming back to the focused, studied talking points (cut spending/borrowing from SSA, Medicaid and Medicare was a recurring point), as well as a few good elbow jabs to the other candidates. Special kudos for the ratcheting up of the hit-meter with the Huckananny Tax Hiker and Mitt-the-Fetus-Killer piece.

Still out in Looney-Land irrelevant: Dr. Ron Paul. While his unique talent to summon “money bombs” and flash mobs of nearly-crazed Truthers, conspiracy theorists, “Libertarians” bordering on anarchists, all adorned with cute stenciled “rEVOLution” signage is nice and all, $5.5M and about 60,000 die-hard supporters arranged around fringe positions that will never be accepted by the GOP mainstream do not bode well. Among this pack of GOP war dogs, Ron Paul is an annoying poodle that whines incessantly while being a nuisance underfoot. Fortunately, he seems not too be willing to run an independent campaign in the (almost certain) event he fails to get the GOP nomination. He would have *just* enough of a following to provide a nasty spoiler effect in a three-way general election.

No Traction/Sliding off into Irrelevance:
- Duncan Hunter (he has great ideas, but low fundraising power and zero traction)
- Tom Tancredo (nearly irrelevant; he is a one-issue candidate, continually carping about immigration.)

Loosers of the Day: Mitt and Rudy. Not that I object terribly to seeing these two get taken down a few notches… but these two are strange foils - Mitt attacking Rudy on immigration, and Rudy attacking back with equal fervor, as well as challenging Mitt on his not-bombproof crime reduction record.

As Iowa front runner, if Mitt knew what was good for him, he should focus more on tamping down Huckabee’s surging influence and start pointing out the Nanny behind Huckabee’s vision for America. I do notice that Huckabee and Rudy are playing quite nicely with each other, and has left me wondering if there just might be a gentleman’s agreement between the two to select the other for VP should the other get the POTUS nod from the GOPCON.

As for Fred, he would do well to consider a similar notion with one of the other top tier candidates. Not sure how that will parse though, as things can and will likely change, and the claws come out and the fangs bared in the next 40+ days until IA and SC.

Definitely worth checking out… at Pajamas Media.

I’m certainly no stickler for grammar, nor do I generally poke fun of other people who dangle their participles, leaving them to weather the slings and arrows of editorial outrage. In fact, I am quite the abuser of the Queen’s English, having set into apoplectic fits many retired schoolteacher grandmothers and grammarians alike.

One of the more persistent editorial bugbears that I run into (working for the Gum’mint as I do) is the Dread Passive Voice…. you know, that stuffy and distancing sort of language that is roundly bloated to the point of being overwhelmingly officious and yet insulates its author securely behind so much language that one risks falling asleep trying to get to the point of it all.

But this (excerpted from an email broadcasted to everyone and his uncle) I cannot let slide so easily, because it is just too funny - the context of it being a lady complaining to building manager about the broken thermostats in her building:

“This morning, I walked in through the basement and immediately, I was hit with what was a very uncomfortable temperature status.”

To her credit, she does get to the point after so many other sentences… but after reading that line, I couldn’t help but to conjure an mental image of a masked, mustachioed, top-hatted (think Snidely Whiplash) bandit clubbing someone viciously with “a very uncomfortable temperature status”.

If this were a politically correct blog (which it is not), I’d probably never use the word “Christmas”. As it is, this word is well on its way to being forever sealed in the “forbidden words vault” (grudging h/t to cartoonist Berkeley Breathed who spawned this idea in an ancient Bloom County comic) where all sorts of infamous and politically incorrect words ultimately find themselves.

As it is, “Merry Christmas” has all but disappeared from the lexicon of holiday names used by advertisers and greeting card companies, replaced with the sterile and completely neutral “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings”, along with some more (feeble) attempts at humouring this with a hash-word like “Happy Merry Christmakwanzakah”.

Which of course, offends the Asatru Pagans - because Yule gets left out of the mix. And Eid-al-Fitr moves around the calendar with the conclusion of Ramadan (based upon the lunar calendar). It gets an honourable mention only because it happened near the “Winter Holiday Season” a few years back.

And nevermind billions of Chinese and southeast Asians whose new year also moves on a different calendar, as well as Greek (and other Eastern) Orthodoxy which keeps its Christmas on January 6th.

Tsk, tsk. Try as we might, we just can’t make everyone happy.

And atheists disparage any sort of nonsensical holidaying about during the winter, at least in any religion-based sense. Under an atheistic regime, the best one could hope for would be a New Year’s day (strictly secular, of course) and maybe some sort of politically correct “diversity day” to offset the vaccuum left by vacating any incarnation of religion on December 25th.

Atheists will be the first to point out that December 25th was not originally a Christian holiday. To a point, this is quite true - and I will agree with the person who (rightly) claims that the 12/15 observance was a Papist construction in the very earliest days of the Church, when much of Europe was still under various pagan gods and goddesses. Most likely, Jesus of Nazareth was born in the late spring, ca. 4~7 BC. (Flabbling over the exact year and day Jesus was born goes beyond the scope of revealed Scripture and well beyond this post; I’ll go with consensus thought here).

Most of these pagan religions of that era observed some sort of major celebration during the winter solstice week. (December 21-28, roughly) and were not particularly connected with the modern observance of the New Year (most nations of that era tracked the New Year along the Roman model, turning the year in March).

What better way for the early church to warm people up to the idea of the Saviour’s birth? Pick a day right smack in the middle of the Solstice Holidays… of course, this substitution took a while to catch on, but catch on it did.

Barring any extremely unlikely, but somehow widely popular move to change Christmas (or at least its proper context of a Christ-centered holy day) from December 25 to some other day, probably in late Spring) … I don’t see why Christians should be cowed into giving up the season’s identity with the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, for the next time someone says “Happy Holidays” or something similar to that, return their greeting to them in the Name of our Lord - “Merry Christmas” right on back.

And now, do excuse me while I locate my Christmas decorations and trimmings to pretty up the place.

Remember. remember, the 21st of November…?

With all due respect to Congressman Paul of Texas, he latched on to a great idea for fund raising. Perhaps we can take it a step further for Fred!

Hopefully, today will be a day that will see Fredheads everywhere turning out to support Fred D. Thompson’s campaign as the only consistent conservative (with a “small c”) by donating a small tax-deductible sum to his campaign.

After years of watching my wife customize her avatar via Yahoo! Japan’s chat interface, I’ve always found myself slightly envious that the Japanese Yahoo! offered such a thing. Her avatar is very, very accurate (or rather, she has accurately chosen which combinations of facial features and accessories and hair to most accurately serve as her “virtual” face to the world).

I don’t use YIM or AIM or much of anything else aside from the occasional visit to a few Linux-oriented IRC channels (of course, since I am constantly breaking stuff, erm… recompiling kernels)… so I cannot tell for sure if YIM (the American version) has gotten around to using these avatars within itself. But… Yahoo! America finally does have the avatars.

I’ve never realized how exactly addictive these little things are… customizing the various options and such.

And, it is a terrific way to kill an afternoon.

Here is an accurate (if I may say so) representation of myself, which will have to do as I am probably not likely to ever post my face on the net.

Not too shabby, eh? It’s accurate from head to toe (as I actually have dark brown-bordering-on-black hair cut in a Caesar-style with a flip, a dark grey turtleneck, an overly long off-white scarf, navy blue jeans, and the sneakers (well, they are actually black Converse All-Stars).

And there’s a generic sushi place a few miles down the road from me that kinda-sorta resembles pretty much any sushi place like the one pictured.

Close enough for gum’mint work, anyway.

Just when you thought that there as too much criticism and attempts to discredit Fred! as a lazy and uninteresting man who is otherwise unqualified to run for POTUS,,,, here comes an excellent article by Peter Mulhern, a commentator and author at Real Clear Politics, that shows the good reasons why Fred D. Thompson may very well be the next President of the United States.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/10/why_thompson_will_win.html

Lightning in Tokyo 【東京の襲雷】

Run for the hills, the Germans are back running amok in Poland!

No, it’s not what you might have thought… the German Army Band was participating in what appears to be a musical performance. But then again, I’d imagine that any seniors that might have lived long enough to remember the bad old days might have had a sudden shock at seeing a German Army unit marching downtown to the beat of the Regimentsgruß.

The odd pause in the middle is curious as well, but the band recovers nicely before moving on to its next location.

Short but sweet on this one:

Please try and tell me that Mr. Hardball isn’t a shill for Hillary at this point.

And I realize that trying to mesh GOP and Dem candidates together on the same metric is a rough patch by any stretch… but try to give us a small break. For one, No. 9 - Bill Richardson - shouldn’t have even passed muster. Richardson is a radical who might make the KosKidz happy, but is by virtue of his almost vitriolic stand for a rapid retreat from the Middle East - and why is Biden in the bottom slot…? I don’t care much for his politics either, but he hasn’t been a total slouch in fund raising either.

Surely that slot could have been used for candidates with more traction, such as Democrat Dennis Kucinich or Libertarian-turned-Republican Ron Paul. Between the UFOs and the “Truther” conspiracy theorism… there’s more than enough fringe entertainment to go around.

But I think that this metric is a bit too broad - my eyes get screwed funny looking at this and trying to rationalize how *Edwards* is higher-ranked than Mitt Romney (who, while I dislike him as a candidate, is comparatively competing at a level a bit higher than Edwards, IMHO).

A better division would be to have the top five Dems and Republicans on one side and the other.

Maybe, something like this: (mind you, this won’t be as ‘purdy’ as the Hardball graphic above)