O’Donnell’s nomination, in hindsight, was a misstep, even though I would contend that the same conditions that lost us the Delaware seat served us well in several other Senate and many House races.

But there was a hidden upside to O’Donnell’s nomination, which we saw yesterday in the battle over the onerous SOPA and PIPA bills. Many well-known Democrats, for example Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, and Al Franken, are on board with these bills, and have little incentive to change their stance. After all, by November the furor over this will largely be forgotten one way or another, and the risk that they might face a primary challenge over the outrage their positions generated is laughable. After all, Democrats voters may be many things, but they’re not so crazy as to defeat their own incumbent and sacrifice the advantage that the incumbancy brings in the general election.

But we, whether we call ourselves Republican, Tea Party, conservative, or what have you, we have demonstrated that we are just that crazy. Okay, technically Mike Castle was not an incumbent but in the context of the state of Delaware he would have carried a similar advantage. But O’Donnell was clearly the more conservative candidate, and she was rewarded, and Castle punished, by Republican voters accordingly.

That is why, when this website called for the primarying of no less of a star than Marco Rubio over his sponsoring of PIPA, Rubio had to take that seriously, and re-evaluate his position accordingly.

I’m a little dubious that yesterday’s Black Out really had the effect its participants imagine. Also, predictably, if a little distressingly, many circles are prepared to give President Obama all the credit should SOPA and PIPA fail.

But one thing that can’t be taken away from us in all of this, is the knowledge that most of our elected representatives still feel the leash around their necks, and can be swayed by influences outside the bubble of the Beltway. That can be a big advantage, if we know how to use it.

Aaron and I seem to be on the same page on one thing, and that is that we would both deeply love it if Rick Perry could find a way to get back some momentum and challenge the current front-runners.

But where we were in conflict as to what the original downfall of the Perry campaign. Aaron cited the Gardasil and immigration controversies, while I was pretty sure there was a third thing… wait, what was that third thing again… oops.

Now I admit that, not having much of a personal following, and being stuck in a state that doesn’t get its say for three more months, my motivation to pay sharp attention to every little swerve may not be as great. I’m still pretty well resigned to being told who my nominee is before I get a real say about it.

But I’m nothing if not willing to confront my mistakes, so I decided to retrace for myself the decline of Rick Perry’s popularity in the GOP polls. For that I referred to the timeline on RealClearPolitics that has been cited previously here on RedState.

I recommend you click the first link above as the chart there is interactive and very revealing.

Perry’s popularity peaked on September 12th, the day Michelle Bachmann went after him over the Gardasil controversy (and shortly thereafter took herself out in the process). But as late as October 1st, Perry still had a useful lead on Romney, with nobody else close.

Then, abruptly, Perry went into a nosedive while the Cain campaign began its doomed rocket ride.

So what happened that week? What was the big event on or about October 1st that allowed Cain to steal all of Perry’s support away?

Just… this.

That’s right, the friggenhead rock.

Remember also how when the story first broke how Cain was more than quick to declare the whole thing a case of “insensitivity” on Perry’s part.

Now, a lot of us here were all, “really?” about this story. And of course we had a chuckle at the sight of reporters desperately combing the countryside looking for that piece of granite that would destroy one of their greatest enemies.

But in hindsight, it appears that while we were chuckling, the rank-and-file GOP voter bought into the story rock-line-and-sinkerhead, and abandoned “insensitive” Perry for “victimized” Cain in droves.

Given how quickly and thoroughly that non-story fell back into well-deserved obscurity, it’s easy to scoff at the idea that that item, of all things, could be what altered the dynamic of the GOP primary race and left us with the relatively unpalatable choices we have today.

But the numbers scoff back, and there’s just no way around the simple fact that the majority of Rick Perry support walked out on him during that peculiar episode in early October, and never came back.

There’s really nothing good that can be concluded from this. And maybe, just maybe, there lie more twists in the tale between now and Iowa, or now and Super Tuesday. Failing that, though, I think there’s a lot of self-examination that will need to be done, to get to the real truth of how we ended up here.

In a scarcely believable ­ruling, a panel of experts threw out a claim that regular water consumption is the best way to rehydrate the body.

Granted, as you can see, even the European mainstream press is looking at this one a little cockeyed, but when government scientists, those oh-so-terribly-smart people who by rights ought to be in charge of everything, can spend three years coming to such a ridiculous conclusion, suddenly the generally sorry state of the European Union starts making a lot more sense in terms of how it came about.

And needless to say, this is the same breed of super-smart scientist who goes along happily with the so-called consensus on man-made global warming and the trillions of dollars of economic impact all that has.

But in all likelihood, this too will pass as just one of those bureaucratic foul-ups that we laugh at and quietly “fix” without much consideration being given to the larger implications about the reliability of the educated elite who wield such massive amounts of authority in our lives.

Just another one of those things so stupid it takes a genius to even think of it.

I did not wake up this morning, heck, I didn’t even go to lunch, thinking this would be the day that broke me as far as interest in the GOP Primary race went.

Yet, here we are.

I never really expected my actual vote to matter, having recently relocated to a state with a mid-late primary date that all but assures its irrelevance in the primary process. But I had hoped that I could take an interest in the outcome in other ways, via my relatively humble donations and whatever semblance of reach my words have.

But as of today, that’s pretty well over.

Just hours ago it started to look like Herman Cain just might have a winning hand. An overhyped hit job was getting people swarming to his defense, and, just for a brief shining moment, the words “President Herman Cain” seemed possible.

Then it all went to crap.

I don’t know whose fault it was, who leaked it, who’s lying, who’s on first, who put the bop in the — well you get the point. I’ve stopped caring. I’m checked right out of this whole mess. If anyone wants credit for the straw that broke my will on this, that talk show guy in Iowa — whatever his name is, I’ve already forgotten it — can have it.

I’ve got other things I can do with both my time and my money than waste it on all this lame infighting and incomprehensible incompetence.

The rest of y’all can go on. Just tell me when it’s over. I’ll be in the next room, writing a bad novel very quickly.

So last night someone tweeted me: “You haven’t blogged at RedState in almost five months.” I was a little surprised anyone noticed.

Initially, I cut off for a while as a spat. Yeah, I can admit it. Not to go into detail, but I wrote up what I thought was a very nice diary entry on a current topic, only to see later that day one of the big names here at RedState write largely the same article and get immediate front page treatment. Yeah, I know, really petty of me, but even I have enough of an ego that finding out I was that low in the pecking order hurt a little.

Anyway, just as that was starting to wear off, I found out that I worked for the only company in America that thought it was a good idea to move jobs OUT of Texas. So that was another major stress factor for me, as I wrestled with the decision to leave a place I love or face unemployment at a particularly bad time to do so. In the end, most of my body may have left Texas, but my heart stayed behind.

Enough about me. Time to get back on topic.

Another reason I haven’t had much to say lately is that Erick Erickson has done an almost eerily good job of expressing my sentiments on the field of candidates. So inasmuch as what I have to say here may sound like I’m simply cribbing Erick, it just shows how much we are on the same page.

I worry that Romney will be McCain 2.0, but unlike the 1.0 version, at least he wouldn’t have to pull a Sarah Palin out of his hat to get me to stop contemplating sitting out the election entirely.

Speaking of Ms. Wasilla, can we talk, please? I thought I “got” you, Sarah. I thought that with your little madcap bus tour and your hide and seek games with the MSM that you were just giving them the biggest tweaking ever and that you never had any intention of running in 2012. And I loved it, too. But Sarah, dear, it’s starting to get old. Worse, it’s starting to feel like the joke is now on those of us who want to get down to business and figure out who to back. It’s not helping either that certain of your supporters cluck their tongues disapprovingly at anyone who dares to even express annoyance at these antics.

Rick Perry. Well, now I know why you wouldn’t grant Bill White a debate during the gubernatorial campaign last year. I don’t know if you can overcome that limitation, but regardless, it was great living in your state and I hope someday to return. As things stand, if I had to cast my primary ballot today, I’d honestly have to flip a coin between you and…

Herman Cain. I kind of wish I’d gone up to talk to you at RSG ’10, but in the moment just being at the coming-out party for a possible next president of the United States was enough for me. I am genuinely thrilled to see you running so strongly this far into the proceedings. We need more people like you in the mix, and I am not afraid to back up that sentiment with my money.

That’s all I have right now. Nothing profound, nothing that’s going to turn heads or make me a player in the game. Just a little something to say, I’m still here.

As of this moment, after initially expressing outrage at the US “violation of sovereignty” in taking out Bin Laden, former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf appears to have done something of a reversal, now saying Bin Laden’s removal was a positive thing all in all.

But actions speak louder than words, and doubly so when comparing the actions of present Pakistani leadership against the words of its former leadership.  As reported by ABC News in their blogs:

Another white-knuckle moment – at the end of the operation, Pakistan’s military scrambled fighter jets looking for the US helicopters. Who knows what could have happened if the Pakistani planes had reached the US helicopters — but they didn’t.

Let’s not kid ourselves. There’s only one reason for Pakistan to be scrambling their jets in search of our helicopters, and it’s not to go pop champagne corks with them.  Pakistan has been harboring Bin Laden for years and the current government is not at all happy to learn we have ended that arrangement.

Don’t misunderstand, this is not a second-guessing of anything. Just an observation of the facts. It’s war.

(Props to Joshua Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation for tweeting this find.)

Now, maybe to you and me this statement is a total brain aneurysm, but then again, Mr. Krugman is still somehow taken seriously by large segments of the population, and the initial reader comment, expressing incredulity that Mr. Krugman would have to explain something so obvious, tells me we have another case of Two America Syndrome at work here.

(I should explain Two America Syndrome, given that’s a term I just made up.  Basically it’s a callback to my earlier blog entry on the lack of empathy in this country, and how we’re devolving into two cultures that are losing the ability to even understand how the other half thinks.)

Let’s give Mr. Krugman a chance to explain.  Essentially, what he appears to be saying (and please read the linked editorial for yourself to judge for yourself if I am not mischaracterizing) is that because there are certain health care situations, mostly involving emergencies, where the patient is unable to make choices for themselves nor has anyone to do so on their behalf, that this somehow makes all healthcare decisions similarly involuntary.

Sorry, I swear I’m trying here. I’m usually pretty good at this, but my Nobel-Laureatese seems to be a little rusty.

Let me try that again.  Krugman takes a situation that hopefully rarely — and if we’re fortunate, never — comes up over the course of our lives, and decides to paint that as encompassing all of health care.  Because these situations occur, where you may find your life in the hands of a doctor you’ve never met, with nothing to guide him or her but experience and ethics, that somehow disqualifies all of healthcare as a service to which such crass concepts as cost savings can apply.

There. I’ve done my best to paraphrase the man. Should he or any of his readers have any further complaints, they may feel free to leave a message.

And now, because one explanation of something that should be obvious deserves another: incapacitated emergency care is a very small part of the overall healthcare system.  A very expensive part for its size, to be sure.  But let’s be plain: you and I do not have life-threatening emergencies every day, or likely even every decade.

No, health care is far, far more than the very specialized case Krugman attempts to portray as the be-all and end-all of the industry.  The simple truth is that most of the time we do make our own health care choices, we do shop around, we do decide for ourselves what we need under given circumstances. That is the essence of a properly functioning health care system.  Yes, Mr. Krugman, sometimes it happens that health care choices have to be made for us, but in a free country those cases are the exception rather than the rule, and forming policy based solely around such cases is faulty logic at best and more than likely simply disingenuous.

Krugman closes his short piece with his usual handwringing about why this health care debate has to be about (pause to grimace) money. Well, Mr. K, in case you hadn’t noticed, the actual quality of health care in this country is pretty well the best anywhere.  There’s a reason why anyone who can afford to do so will take advantage of the health care services our country has to offer.  We focus on cost because that’s the problem.  Piously declaring that it because extreme cases occur where cost considerations are rightly set aside, therefore it’s always wrong to take cost into consideration, is a condition with a simple diagnosis: lazy thinking.

UPDATE: Ben Domenech has another, apparently more front-page worthy piece on the same topic.

It’s actually a bit of a pity the NY Daily News actually acts journalistic and tells us the whole point of the exercise right in the headline of the story.  But for that, one might have some fun pitting the bureaucrats against the national anti-obesity campaign.

But no, it quickly becomes clear that the Health Department doesn’t actually want to ban these everyday play activities we all participated in growing up.  No, they simply want to use them as a way of making it nigh impossible for small, independent summer camp operations to avoid their oversight and regulation.  I have little doubt that these measures have the support of the larger summer camps, who will see this as a way of keeping their business from being siphoned off by smaller competitors.

I think this is another example of why the movie Atlas Shrugged didn’t have as much of an impact on me as it might have.  With a government that feels this free to pass any kind of laws and regulations it feels like in real life, what’s the big deal about seeing much the same thing, ramped up only a little, in a work of fiction?

Also, a secondary warning, this diary entry may come off a bit disjointed.  The main reason for this is that I am still trying to sort out how I feel about Atlas Shrugged, Part One, which I went to view on its opening day this weekend.

I guess I’ll start with how I went into it. I have never read through Ayn Rand’s iconic novel, but I did know going in the premise of the story, a general idea about how the plot progresses, and perhaps regrettably, I have spoiled myself on the ending, including who John Galt turns out to be. I came in with some mild optimism that I would find the movie a guilty pleasure. After all, who among us in Red State America haven’t fantasized at least a little about telling the government where to shove its onerous and often misguided laws and regulations passed in the name of “fairness” or “the common good”? Who among us, just to pick one example, didn’t smirk as New York governor David Paterson tried lamely to make it sound like it was worth losing all the taxes Rush Limbaugh paid his state to have finally driven Rush’s media empire from his domain?

So I guess that was the kind of thing I hoped to see a lot of in Atlas Shrugged, Part One.  A bunch of Take Thats as the hopelessly bureaucratic government ate karmic breakfast as a result of its own misguided actions.

After the movie, when I asked around on Twitter about things about the movie I didn’t quite understand, I noticed a definite pattern in the responses.  Basically, they boiled down to “Wait for the next two parts”. What was the deal with the pirate? Wait for the sequel. Why does nobody seem to have a proximate motivation for anything they do? The sequels will explain it. Can’t anyone beside Dagny express the least bit of outrage over anything? (Apart from Mr. Wyatt’s mid-film tirade, which he manages to direct at the only person in the film who doesn’t deserve it.)  It’s coming… apparently.

Let’s go to straight to the ending (last chance to avoid spoilers!), where, in response to Wesley Mouch piling on legislative atrocity after legislative atrocity, Mr. Wyatt decides (off-screen, of course) that enough is enough and he runs off with everyone else, burning his oil fields as he goes. Okay, first things first, the Big No from Dagny, I could have done without. Simple stunned disbelief or even a look of horror as she read the sign would have worked so much better in my book. Next, I have to say that it’s an artifact of the book’s 1950′s setting that burning the oil fields was even necessary. This is because in the 1950′s we still had a government that might have had the nerve to “get its hands dirty” in the actual operation of an oil field. Today, Wyatt could have dropped his oil fields into the government’s lap fully intact and they’d have them run into the ground if not burnt down within a matter of weeks, all in the name of promoting alternative energy.

But I think maybe what really bugs me is how hopeless the ending feels. Sure, there have been trilogy installments with relatively “downer” endings, but even then they usually manage to placate the viewer with a small victory. The Empire Strikes Back is a major example of this. Yes, the rebels are still trying to regroup after being flushed out of their base, and Han Solo is in a world of hurt, but at least Luke got away from Darth Vader and will fight another day. But where is the “at least” in Atlas Shrugged Part One? Dagny looks totally defeated, Hank Rearden can’t be bothered to look up from his work long enough to care about the governmental noose tightening around his neck, and as for the government itself, it looks like it will just roll on, oblivious to the damage its actions are causing, just as it does to a slightly lesser extent in the real world.

I guess maybe I’m supposed to assume that Wyatt’s oil fields are something truly irreplaceable, that without them America’s now really, really in big trouble. Except, from what we saw on the streets, things looked like they sucked about as much as they possibly could already. Will gasoline going from $37.50/gallon to, say, $100/gallon mean all that much when even $37.50 was too much for any but the wealthy to afford anyway?

Another thing that bugged me was all the one-scene characters that we’re nevertheless expected to take to be really, really important. One scene, where someone we don’t know is approached by the mysterious figure and is then reported missing is fine, just to demonstrate what’s happening, but two or three more such scenes and it starts feeling superfluous. Why can’t we have someone we halfway care about, like maybe Dagny’s right hand man Eddie, decide to defect? I know, because that’s not how the story goes, but frankly I’d almost welcome a deviation from the source material if it would help me care about what’s going on more.

Then there was the big conflict that took up the bulk of Part One, the whole question of whether Rearden Metal was a miracle invention capable of single-handedly saving the nation or the biggest deathtrap since the Ford Pinto. Naturally, the possibility that the truth might lie anywhere in between isn’t even a consideration. Nor, apparently, does Rearden have any way of demonstrating its product’s value to the public outside of a full-scale, real-world project. And even that triumph quickly felt hollow. What was stopping anyone from arguing — quite plausibly — that a single successful run proves nothing about how well those rails will be holding up after a year or two of regular use?

Maybe the problem is that, despite my political leanings, I’m not really the target audience for Atlas Shrugged, Part One.  Message-wise, the movie really has very little to tell me that I don’t already know already about the self-serving nature of modern government and the deleterious effects of runaway legislation and regulation.  But it’s hardly targeted at the left, who probably look at this movie and wonder “why is any of this being portrayed as a bad thing?” The great middle, then, perhaps?  Maybe if you can find one that’s paying enough attention to know how invasive the government is in everything, even those things which the media blithely blames on Big Whatever-Other-Than-Government, but normally we call such people Conservatives and Libertarians.

That said, I do take one piece of Atlas Shrugged-related amusement away from current headlines, wherein the president of AFSCME essentially claims that unionized public sector workers are the true Atlases of this world, and that America would truly know suffering if they ever decided to go on strike… er, again. (If you really need the jokes in response to that, just read the linked article’s comment section.)

Atlas Shrugged, Part One is a movie I really wanted to like. In fact, it’s a movie that I really feel that I should have liked, which is why I’ve spent 1200 words scratching my head over why it is that I didn’t. Maybe it all goes back to those tweets I got advising me to wait for the sequels and then things will start making more sense. The problem is, sequels are supposed to answer the question, “what happens next?”, not “what just happened?”. ]]> http://www.redstate.com/mustango/2011/04/18/atlas-shrugged-is-it-the-movie-or-is-it-me-spoilers/ The American people, opinions of the Ruling Class to the contrary notwithstanding, are not stupid. We knew this day was coming.

We knew it two years ago this Friday, when hundreds of thousands of us gathered across many locations, in numbers large and small, to protest what many in Washington still had the chutzpah to pretend wasn’t coming down the pike.

The mortgage bailouts. The massive — and in many cases futile — corporate/union bailouts. The nearly-trillion dollar package that make a joke of the word “stimulus”. We knew what all of that was leading up to.

Today, per all accounts, President Obama will ascend to the podium and tell us he has a great idea for fixing the problem of the deficit the majority of which he and his party’s Congress created.  He is going to raise taxes.

Of course he’ll try to sell it. He’ll make the case that, regardless of whether you agreed with all that spending, we have no choice but to pay for it now. He’ll try to make it sound to the average American voter that this tax increase will have no impact whatsoever on them. He’ll be lying, of course, but so what else is new. At this point it’s all we can hope for that he won’t repeat the cliches word-for-word about “making the rich pay their fair share” and similarly.

Today’s speech will embody everything we protested against on April 15, 2009. It is why we created the Tea Party, to establish a beachhead in Congress that, hopefully, will stand up to the president and tell him no.  No, Mr. President, we were voted here explicitly to see to it that you did not raise taxes on the American people and, if nothing else, we are going to live up to that duty.

We have spent two years preparing for this day. Today — of all days — let us not blink.