Weirdnesses

Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee have taken whatever marbles they hadn't already lost and gone home.  Will their speeches for the rubber chicken dinner circuit now be worth more, or less?  Beats me.

So I was watching a Showtime documentary on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints last night, and realized that Warren Jeffs, their charismatic leader currently doing life plus for child molestation, and Ben Carson, currently leading the polls in the Republican Iowa caucuses, sound exactly alike!  Before you let the media get you too excited about Carson winning Iowa, remember that Mike Huckabee won in 2008.  Will Carson, too, win his own show on Fox?  Stay tuned.

Catch-up

Russia in Syria
The main question: why?  Is Putin acting for internal Russian consumption, continuing his "strong man" routine?  Is he concerned about losing Russia's naval base?  It's not because he likes Assad — nobody likes Assad.  Maybe he's just decided that since Syria probably is the most fucked-up arena in the world, Russia, hoping to re-establish itself as a "world power," just has to be there.

Initially, it seemed inevitable that Russia only could make the megamess worse, but there is a possibility that Russia might make things better, by sharing some of the responsibility for pumping out the cesspool.  After all, Syria can't get much worse.

Hillary and Benghazi
Yawn.

Migrants
The United States has no valid excuse for admitting so few war refugees, leaving others to shoulder the load.  The idea that we need two years per applicant to filter out potential "terrorists" is nothing but an excuse.  The real motive for the unconscionable rigmarole is xenophobia and racism.

Paul Ryan
Of course.  All the "I don't wanna" was bullshit from word one.  He always had the essential quality: allegiance to the economic policy of soaking the poor to further enrich the rich and pretending it creates "growth."  Despite it's other bizarre obsessions, the Freedom Caucus agrees.

The Primaries
I'm still giving Bernie money, even though it's dead certain now that Hillary will be the Democratic candidate, and that Bernie's pulled her about as far to the left as she's ready to go.

In the meanwhile, the Republican field continues to be a total freak show: Ben Carson!?  He makes Trump seem reasonable (and intelligent) by comparison.  Bush, despite all his money, appears to be dead in the water.  Ted Cruz, who is straight-out evil, is moving up — but he's far too ugly to be elected president.  Rubio, the quintessential opportunist but pretty as a picture, may end up the candidate — and, sadly, he might even win.

Donald, Carly, and Ben

Given the quality of their politicians, it is understandable that Republicans would want a non-politician as their presidential candidate.  Sadly for them, the three they have on offer are unlikely to be any better than the rest of the incompetents crowding their field.

Government is not a business.  We don't allow it to be a business, because as soon as any government enterprise threatens to make some money, it gets privatized.  Even if it were a business, we still wouldn't want anybody as incompetent as Donald or Carly running it.

Donald inherited $60 million from his father, and now he claims to be worth eight billion, albeit Forbes estimates that four billion probably is more like it.  Had he invested his inheritance in a fund indexed to the S&P 500, he'd be worth twelve billion today.  Actively managing his money, apparently, was a costly mistake.  As for his Atlantic City bankruptcies, he probably should have noticed all the casinos opening in neighboring states because Grover Norquist wouldn't allow them to raise taxes.

As became clear during her Senate run against Barbara Boxer, Carly really did screw up at HP, and her prior efforts at Lucent were not much better.  Her self-declared "successes," like the merger with COMPAQ, had to be undone by her successors to avoid financial disaster.  One successful put-down of Donald Trump does not a presidential candidate make, or the field would be filled with late-night comedians.

As for Ben Carson, a brain surgeon does not have to be a "rocket scientist."  Brain surgery is a manual skill, rather like a higher level of auto mechanics.  Just the fact that a person can separate conjoined twins while believing the universe is 6000 years old should tell us something.

Whoever the Republicans are left with in the end is likely to be more than a little shopworn,  On the Democratic side, though, Hillary also has been subject to more than a little wear and tear.  It's beginning to look like record low voter turnout in 2016.