Cain Disqualified

For me anyway.   Cain was asked last night by Piers Morgan on CNN about his views on abortion.   His first answer was solid:  “I believe that life begins at conception and abortion under no circumstances." 

But then, Morgan asked Cain if he would want his daughter or granddaughter, if raped, to keep the baby.   Cain responded:

 “It’s not the government’s role, or anybody else’s role to make that decision.  Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidence, you’re not talking about that big a number. So what I’m saying is, it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president. Not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family, and whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn’t have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue."

If that's his view, I couldn't vote for him for President.   (I likely wouldn't anyway, as I've said previously, because I don't think he's a very good candidate generally.)   Wishy-washiness on Life issues is a disqualifier for me, period.

Cain, of course, sent out the obligatory Twitter message today saying, "I’m 100% pro-life. End of story.”   OK.   Fine.   But you said what you said to Morgan, and that means we can't trust what you're saying now after you've "lawyered up" with your political consultants.   

The Good Movie Season Returns

We're entering the season when Hollywood starts releasing good movies again, movies that they think might win Academy Awards.   If I were a betting man, I'd say this movie about Shakespeare, Anonymous, looks like a good bet:



And, for Best Actor, I think George Clooney has probably paid his dues and will win for this new movie, The Descendants:

Joe Biden, Arch-Demagogue

Vice-President Biden hit a new low this week when he said that more women will be raped if Republicans don't pass Obama's latest mini-jobs bill, which includes $5 billion for police and firefighters (and $30 billion for teachers' unions).   And he compounded it by berating a young reporter from the conservative website Human Events who had the audacity to call him on it:



Two things: first, note the young staffer at the end who asks the reporter "who are you with?"   What she means is that the Democrats don't expect to have to answer tough questions from the "real" media, so he must be from some low-life Internet news outfit.   They know that the "real" media is 95% ultra-liberal Democrats, and they expect to get a pass on their demagoguery from those "real" reporters.

Second, and along the same lines, doesn't Biden's whole finger-pointing seem extraordinarily unseemly for an elected official in a democracy responding to a reporter's questions?   His attitude is the attitude of John Kerry... "don't you know who I am?"

Ten Lessons for 2012 (Or, For That Matter, Right Now)

Kevin Williamson in NRO lists 10 things to keep in mind for 2012.   But, really, what he's offering is a list of ten things we need to keep in mind every day beginning today and going on into the future for as far as the eye can see:

With an eye on 2012, here are ten important but sometimes counterintuitive facts to keep in mind:

1.      There is no austerity.
2.      There was no deregulation.
3.      You can’t trust Republicans on spending.
4.      Wall Street loves Democrats.
5.      People who voted for Barack Obama on civil-liberties grounds are fools.
6.      If you aren’t for massive entitlement reform, you’re for massive tax hikes.
7.      But taxing the rich won’t close the deficit.
8.      The housing bubble was largely a political creation.
9.      Well-meaning politicians are just as dangerous as self-serving ones.
10.  There’s no way out of this jam without big cuts to popular programs.

The real debate isn’t whether to cut, only what and how much and when. (My preferred answers: almost everything, a lot, now.)

The links provide the meat, but this is a useful set of talking points.   Or, really, screaming points.  

Birthdays Today

A lot of interesting birthdays today, but not a lot of time to talk about them.   There's Christopher Wren, the great English architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, born in 1632; the doomed French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, born in 1854; the American philosopher and "educator," John Dewey, born in 1859 (I put the quotes around "educator" because Dewey's philosophy of progressive education has done a great deal of damage in America; Charles Edward Ives, the American composer, born in 1874; Mickey Mantle, the great Yankee slugger, born in 1931; and Tom Petty, the rocker, born in 1950 (just another classic rocker now over 60 years old).

But the two that leap out for me are two figures who provide echoes of my childhood.   First, Margaret Dumont was born in 1889.   Dumont was the "straight man" in the greatest of the Marx Brothers' movies, playing an older society lady outraged by the wildness of Groucho Marx, as here, in the 1933 movie Duck Soup:




Great stuff.    I used to watch these movies on Saturdays when I was a kid, and I don't think I've ever seen anything any funnier in American movies since.  

Meanwhile, the soundtrack of my youth was the classic jazz my Dad played all the time, and his favorite was also born today, in 1890 -- Jelly Roll Morton.   Here's Morton playing one of his greatest compositions, "The Pearls," from 1926:



I recall learning how to play this in high school so I could play it for Dad.   Pretty sure I never played it that well, but I hope he didn't mind.   It's beautiful music and arguably, with the rest of jazz from the 1920s through the 1950s (as in everything else, jazz veered off course in the 1960s), the one true American art form.  

Picture of the Night

Cardinals' Magic Run Continues

The Cardinals are up 1-0 in the World Series.   Their magical run continues -- everybody Tony La Russa brings in out of the bullpen seems to suddenly be unhittable, with his new closer, Jason Motte, leading the way with a 97-99 mph fastball.

Motte, a converted catcher, has pitched 9 post-season innings in relief, and has given up 1 hit, 0 walks, and 0 runs, and is 5 for 5 in saves.   I looked up Mariano Rivera's statistics, since he's generally thought of as the greatest post-season closer of all-time.   Rivera's best post-season ever was in 1998 when he pitched 13 1/3 innings, gave up 6 hits, 2 walks and 0 runs in earning six saves as the Yankees won the World Series.    Adam Wainwright's miracle season in 2006 is another possible comparison:   Wainwright went 9 2/3 innings, gave up seven hits, two walks, and 0 runs in earning four saves.  

In other words, and without jinxing him (I hope), Motte is on pace to record the greatest post-season year for a closer ever.   Wow.