Right Wing Nut House

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It occurred to me this morning that I have not written a baseball post this year, a happenstance of which I’m sure most of you are profoundly grateful. No matter. I know full well that Americans have fallen out of love with the game and I could care less. For those few of us left who see baseball as more than a game, more than one more endless play for our leisure time dollars, we are charged with a sacred mission; keep alive that love in our breasts until the world is right side up again and baseball is restored to its proper place in the sports firmament.

In this respect, we are like Ray Bradbury’s old ones who, in Fahrenheit 451, memorize a classic to save it from the firemen, lovingly passing the words in the book from one generation to the next, hoping for the day when it will be safe to read Chaucer, Melville, Shakespeare, and Dickinson again. For us baseball fans - older, more conservative generally, and respectful of America’s past - there is the recognition that it is a classic game that achieved it zenith in popularity just as America was making its transition from a pastoral land to an urban industrial place. It was this change that perhaps condemned baseball to eventual decline although it was certainly hastened along by other, more destructive alterations.

Some consider the designated hitter rule to be emblematic of baseball’s self destructive tendencies. I wouldn’t go quite as far as all that. The DH was put in the game at a time when pitcher’s routinely won 20 games with ERA’s under 2.0 and baseball was a much more nuanced game. It is my opinion that owners misdiagnosed the problem back then, believing that the fans were leaving because of the low scoring games. The problem with the game was much more fundamental than that and no amount of tinkering would have prevented baseball from plummeting from the heights it occupied in the 50’s and 60’s.

The fact is, America was changing. And since baseball is a game built on tradition and history, it couldn’t change with the times. We tend to forget that until the NFL broke through in the late 1960’s with TV audiences to rival baseball’s, there was no other game in town - or the nation. Other sports were seen as diversions to mark the time until Spring training began in February. As popular as football is today, it will never capture the heart and soul of the country as baseball did in the decades immediately preceding and immediately after World War II.

No, Baseball couldn’t change. The game itself is draped in tradition, in memory. There is no other game seen through the prism of remembrance quite like baseball. Whether sitting on the back porch in 1950’s and 60’s suburbia listening to the hissing, static filled play-by-play on radio while the fireflies blinked to announce their presence and the sweet smell of Jasmine filled the nostrils with the scent of summer, of family, of a shared passion. Or perhaps in the city you sat on the front stoop with every other house on the block blaring out the call of the game, a broadcast legend conducting a city wide symphony of sound, mothers with babies, fathers with sons, and the young, the old, laughing, talking, arguing, loving. A neighborhood, a community united around a passion so intense that enmities were temporarily forgotten as “the boys” or “the bums” performed extraordinary feats of effortless athleticism with both the workmanlike attitude of the blue collar hero and the pizazz of a circus performer.

Yes, that America existed at one time. And while memory may skew some of the details and gloss over much of the unseemly realities from those times, there is no doubt that baseball for much of the country occupied a privileged position in the hearts and minds of the people. In a time before the total saturation of sports, before ubiquitous replays, before free agency made players into hobos, before steroids turned the players into Frankenstein monsters, before rape trials and murder trials and divorces and scandal after scandal there was the pitcher, the batter, and the lovely dance of strategy and possibility. To bunt or not to bunt. To swing away or hit and run. To pitch out, or put the rotation” play on, or simply to play “straight up.” This was actually part of the national conversation when baseball was king.

But America stands still for no one. Certainly not for a game that used to be known as “The National Pastime.” For that is what one did when a game was in progress; pass the time in other pursuits while the game itself functioned as the background to daily life. While we sat on the porch listening to the game, as a family we would be laughing, joking, carrying on, reading, knitting - all the things that families do together that cements the bonds of love and affection we hold so dear and make life itself fill up with joy and satisfaction. Of course, utter silence would reign when some pivotal point in the game was occurring. But otherwise, baseball was important for what it meant as a shared experience for the family, for the neighborhood, and for the larger community in which we lived.

It is Midsummer here in the Midwest. The corn has surpassed the “elephant’s eye” measurement and is almost ready for the harvest. Soon, little farmer’s stands will start springing up along Route 23 where you can buy corn picked within the hour, along with other crops that are so fresh and crisp you expect them to wiggle out of the paper bag in which the nice old lady or cute young teenage girl carefully packs your purchases. There may be no better meal on planet earth than any barbecued meat and fresh corn on the cob.

The temperature outside is at its usual July apogee, bearing down on 95 degrees with humidity that makes it feel as if a Swedish bath might be preferable. To escape the heat, Native Americans built steam rooms, probably figuring if they were going to be uncomfortably hot and damp, they may as well make a ritual out of it.

But there are some modern inventions that are not to be lightly dismissed. Central air conditioning is a fine example of the practical marrying with the sublime to create a luxury almost everyone can afford. And tonight, as I watch today’s incarnations of baseball heroes (or what passes for heroes in these cynical times), sitting in my air conditioned house, and watching the game on my 57″ HDTV (another good example of genius marrying up with necessity - you don’t know what you missed if you’ve never had an HD TV), I will remember All-Star games past and the now ancient Gods who walked among us; Mantle, Berra, Mays, Williams, Musial. Most of them I saw at the end of their careers. But that didn’t dim their luster or make them any less divine in my eyes.

The fireflies will be out early as they are this time of year. The owl will begin hooting at regular intervals while the as yet unseen hawk will screech out his warning from high above somewhere. Both owl and hawk help control the bunny rabbit population that exploded last year until they were overrunning the place. But nature, in its wisdom and in its need for balance, sent us the old barn owl last August and the hawk not long after. We don’t have a bunny rabbit problem anymore.

This is baseball’s all-star break, one of the hallowed traditions of summer and usually marks the period halfway between Independence Day and Labor Day. The older I get, the sadder I am that summer is half gone and soon - all too soon - the bitter Midwestern winter will arrive and baseball, the owl, the hawk, and everything I am enjoying this night will be but a distant memory.

But as any good baseball fan can assure you - there’s always next year.

An interesting piece in yesterday’s Boston Globe by Drake Bennett on some youthful (so to speak) conservatives who are trying to inject some new blood into the right’s intellectual firmament that lately has seemed to be suffering from some kind of iron deficiency according to liberal critics.

To be sure, the idea that conservatism is “dead” (Tanenhaus), or “exhausted” (Borosage) has been a favorite hobby horse of liberals for a few years. But for purposes of dealing with the reality of what is happening with conservatism, I prefer the notion that we have simply lost our way - politically, intellectually, and as a social nexus.

Tanenhaus (who actually had some relevant thoughts about the too ideological nature of the conservative “movement”) believes that conservatism’s decline is actually a boon to the right because the philosophical framework had been hijacked by decidedly un-conservative forces.

This is actually recognized by a couple of Bennett’s up and comers:

Luigi Zingales says it’s time for conservatives to fall out of love with businesses, and fall back in love with the free market. In an argument that’s begun to catch the ear of a few conservative thinkers, Zingales suggests that it’s often business itself, rather than the government, that the market needs protection from.

“I’m very strongly pro-market and very strongly against business,” says the Italian-born economist, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Separating the support of free markets from the long Republican alliance with business isn’t easy, says Zingales, but it’s important. As he and colleague Raghuram Rajan laid out in their 2003 book, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists,” powerful companies, given the chance, work hand-in-glove with government officials to craft laws and regulations that protect them while limiting competition and transparency.

Many conservatives have been sensing this for years but either through cowardice or simple practical politics, refused to recognize the fact that corporations have become as supportive of statism as any far left Democrat you can name. In this way, they stifle competition, give themselves unfair advantage through regulation, and give money to candidates from both parties so that they can mitigate the effects of unfriendly legislation - usually through the earmark process but sometimes by their congressional lackey slipping an amendment into a bill in the dead of night when no one is noticing that favors them to the exclusion of others.

The Bush administration invited corporate lobbyists into government in order to regulate the businesses they most recently were employed by. Mr. Fox, meet Mrs. Hen. Zingales believes such a set up contributed to the financial meltdown last fall as financial corporations developed rules and regulations favorable to themselves and not necessarily good for regulating their activities.

The Zingales critique is not new but some of his solutions should raise eyebrows on the right, like helping “workers” instead of businesses during he current downturn and dispensing any stimulus based on an algorithmic solution rather than the kind of cronyism we have seen to date.

Four years ago I would have wondered what Zingales was smoking in order to call himself a conservative and not support business. But the Democratic takeover of congress should have convinced anyone on the right that big business cared little about markets and more about being able to control government for their individual aggrandizement. The latest example: Wal-Mart hopping aboard the Obamacare train before it left the station. By supporting the public option and the insurance mandate for companies to supply health insurance to their workers, Wal-Mart gets to influence the final package so that it is tailored more to their needs.

Bennett also explores the efficacy of the blogosphere in acting as a feeder program for conservative ideas - a function reserved in the past for the few conservative mags like NR and Human Events as well as some think tanks like AEI and Heritage. He uses as an example, the Atlantic’s excellent Megan McCardle as someone who has slipped into the role of gatekeeper and facilitator of conservative ideas:

“[Blogging] is decreasing the power of being part of the feeder system and feeder schools, and of being part of the ecosystem, which I certainly wasn’t,” says Megan McArdle.

McArdle, whose politics make her more a libertarian than a classic conservative, is one of the most prominent voices in the political blogosphere. Also an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, she came to both journalism and blogging somewhat sideways, after working at a series of failed Internet start-ups and going to business school.

[...]

McArdle and bloggers like her, in other words, have created their own intellectual ecosystem. William F. Buckley was widely admired for his determination and ability to bring a diversity of conservative voices into National Review, and similarly, McArdle’s blog is among the best at organizing the cacophony of the political blogosphere into something closer to a conversation. Blog posts on the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination or the outlines of the stimulus package alternate with links to the insights of artificial-intelligence expert Jim Manzi, who writes on science and environmental policy, or Daniel Larison, a politically minded scholar of Byzantine history.

For all the connections she creates, McArdle is an often vehement disagreer as well, and a believer in the blogosphere’s power to kill off wrongheaded arguments on the way to something new and important. “It can take a long time,” she says, “but bad ideas do tend to die.”

No, McArdle is not a conservative in the classic sense but her blog is one of the best at collating right of center ideas and disbursing them around the internet. Her own analysis of economics is the best “plain English” explanations you can find - certainly better than any MSM business section writer and surpassing the Wall Street Journal by plenty. She has a first class mind and an excellent sense of being able to cut through the chaff and find the essence of an idea. A rare bird indeed.

Bennett hightlighted a couple of other “new” conservative thinkers but the only other one I was interested in is Reihan Salam, a former research assistant for David Brooks and someone whose writings have influenced me over the last few months.

It’s hard to peg Salam as a true “man of the right” for many ideological conservatives today. That’s because he is not in favor of repealing the Great Society and the New Deal.

He and I came to the same conclusion independently of one another; that a more pragmatic, realistic conservatism is necessary for political success; that conservatives should embrace government in order to reform it and make it as conservative as is practically possible.

If big government is necessary, Salam asks, and can even help create a society more agreeable to conservatives, then what should it be doing? Drawing in part on the work of scholars such as Wilcox, Salam and Douthat craft a vision of a government that is activist in a different way, putting priority on stability and responsibility, along with opportunity. They push for child-care subsidies, market-friendly healthcare reform, more affordable housing, and for wage subsidies to boost the incomes of poor young men and make them more eligible for marriage and stable fatherhood.

“The idea is, let’s actually reduce the scope of government in some areas, where it’s kind of pernicious, but let’s increase its role in some areas, insofar as increasing the role can actually increase freedom,” Salam says.

Under the Obama administration, Salam has continued to press the case for big-government conservativism in articles and as a blogger for both the National Review and the online Daily Beast.

Salam was an early Sarah Palin supporter which should give anyone pause about accusing him of being anything other than a pragmatic conservative. His argument is the same I have been making for many months on this site; the road back for conservatism is not through the ideological terrorists who have set themselves up as arbiters of conservative dogma, condemning those they determine to have strayed from their extraordinarily narrow minded and confining definition of conservatism.

Rather, it is through advocating the reasoned and pragmatic application of conservative principles to government as it exists today that will bring the right out of the darkness. And a couple of the conservatives mentioned in Bennett’s article will probably be leading the way.

By the way, that may be the first article I’ve read on conservatism in a while that made no mention of Ronald Reagan. Many ideological conservatives have deified Reagan while failing to recognize where The Gipper’s true genius lay.

Ronald Reagan did not create a conservative government during his 8 years in office. Government grew substantially (although at a slower rate than the previous decade) during his two terms as president. Neither did Reagan always stand fast on his principles as the 1986 tax increase proved - the largest tax increase in history at the time. He also made several other compromises including cutting deals on social security and numerous budget items.

When one considers that he ignored the vital principle of not negotiating with terrorists when he exchanged arms for hostages, it is difficult to understand why conservatives today can say that they wish contemporary politicians were “more like Reagan” in adhering to principled stands on issues in Congress.

Selective memory when it comes to Reagan and his actual governance gets in the way of returning to a more pragmatic conservatism that The Gipper supported in practice, even though his rhetoric sometimes belied his realistic approach to governing.

Ronald Reagan was a pragmatic ideologue who tried to make government as conservative as was possible during his time in office. Striving but falling far short of the kind of government those who invoke his name so reverently today envision as “true” conservative government. This continuously angered the conservative purists in and out of government - a fact long forgotten by those who see the historical Reagan as a civic saint and who believe conservative politicians should emulate everything from his personae to his agenda in order to find success at the polls.

The conservative mentioned in Bennett’s article - along with a few others like Conor Friedersdorf, Ross Douthat, (who collaborated with Salam in writing a book about how the right can make a comeback) and because he’d probably feel bad if I left him out, David Frum - are on the cusp of the new media’s attempt to recalibrate conservatism so that it reflects a more dynamic, and pragmatic, reality.

The ideologues dismiss their ideas at their own peril.

When the “Torture Memos” were released a couple of months ago, President Obama took what I thought was the correct course; acknowledge the episode in our history, condemn it, pledge that it won’t happen again, and move on into the future:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence.

I still believe this is exactly the correct course of action, albeit with one caveat; investigate this “painful chapter in our history” so we can discover how this happened.

It is obvious to any rational, thinking, fair minded individual that the Bush Administration did not undertake this torture regime lightly, nor did they carry it out for self-aggrandizing purposes, nor did they believe they were in the wrong. Their motives were to protect the country - as it turns out, at too high a cost. They were not looking for political advantage. They were looking for information.

There is a dispute over whether they got anything of value from their illegal actions, but using hindsight to judge the torture regime purely on efficacious grounds is nonsense. In their view, they had to try. That was the whole point of what even they acknowledged several times was shaky legal activity.

I don’t happen to think it was that close of a call legally but others have made some cogent arguments that the Bush administration did indeed walk a fine legal line. I reject those arguments as sophistry because they are given “after the fact” as justification for actions already taken. There were enough lawyers in the Bush Justice Department who knew better and protested prior to the illegal torture that there should be little doubt that the fig leaf of legality supplied by Yoo and others was inadequate to the situation.

Surely, there must be some kind of investigation into how the Bushies arrived at the decision that what they were doing wasn’t torture despite ample evidence that it was. Their overriding argument appears to be that “it really didn’t hurt that much” because they took precautions (such as limiting the time a prisoner would be forced to undergo waterboarding) and that the pain they inflicted left few marks and healed in a matter of days.

Once the psychological barrier against torture was broken, it appears that things got out of control from there. So yes, let’s investigate. But prosecute?

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.

Naming a prosecutor to probe alleged abuses during the darkest period in the Bush era would run counter to President Obama’s oft-repeated desire to be “looking forward and not backwards.” Top political aides have expressed concern that such an investigation might spawn partisan debates that could overtake Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda.

The White House successfully resisted efforts by congressional Democrats to establish a “truth and reconciliation” panel. But fresh disclosures have continued to emerge about detainee mistreatment, including a secret CIA watchdog report, recently reviewed by Holder, highlighting several episodes that could be likened to torture.

Holder’s decision could come within weeks, around the same time the Justice Department releases an ethics report about Bush lawyers who drafted memos supporting harsh interrogation practices, the sources said. The legal documents spell out in sometimes painstaking detail how interrogators were allowed to subject detainees to simulated drowning, sleep deprivation, wall slamming and confinement in small, dark spaces.

Prosecutions would no doubt please some on the left who want a pound of flesh from Bush administration officials. But is the administration really that keen on reigning in Holder and preventing him from looking at this “dark chapter in our history?”

Methinks the Obama administration doth protest too much. A distraction like this is just what the doctor ordered to take people’s minds off the fact that the stim bill isn’t working, that there is a growing call from Obama’s left flank for a second stimulus measure, that his cap and trade bill is in big trouble in the senate, and that it is far from certain that his his health care plan will come out the way he wants - with a public option that will be paid for without taxing the middle class.

Rallying his base to the cause of prosecuting Bush administration officials for torture will also take their minds off how he has betrayed them on a host of issues from gay rights to his agreement to indefinite detentions of terrorists.

So might this unleashing of Holder on Bush era torture crimes be nothing more than a distraction from the woeful economy that is resisting the president’s importunings to improve? Obama wouldn’t be the first president to use the tactic and he wouldn’t be the last if that is his game.

A good old fashioned investigation with strategic leaks and the spectacle of Bushies marching into the Justice Department to testify would serve as excellent bait for the media who no doubt would go overboard in their coverage of the hated Bush administration’s torture policies.

Bread and circuses worked for the Roman pro-consuls who used the spectacles to distract a populace constantly on the verge of starvation.

Why not Obama?

Let’s put down our political playbooks today and put on our thinking caps.

What is “consciousness?” Even trying to define it can get you into trouble. Is it something only humans possess? How does perception affect reality? Does it affect it at all? How did we achieve self-awareness?

Endless questions which, in the Socratic method of argument, only means that the mystery of how, when, what, and who regarding consciousness will continue. It is the conscious mind that formulates the questions, and supplies the answers - inadequate though they might be. This is why the question of what is consciousness crosses so many disciplines and fields of study. Science, philosophy, religion, metaphysics - all have taken a stab at trying to tell us why we are who we are.

I have been fascinated by this subject despite my woefully inadequate grounding in science and philosophy. So it was with great pleasure that I came across this piece at Pajamas Media by Mike LaSalle who runs the blog Mensnewsdaily.com, a site that has linked here on occasion over the years. Mike’s piece posits a new theory of consciousness that is mindboggling; that nothing is “real” in the conscious sense until it is observed. In other words, we create our own consciousness by what we experience through our 5 senses.

This is certainly a far cry from how the Romans saw consciousness and especially how Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas viewed the mystery. Aquinas saw consciousness as a result of knowing our own moral choices as displayed against the backdrop of a moral universe. Fundamentally, knowing right from wrong made us human.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that science really got going on the subject. To this day, there is a school of thought that believes consciousness is little more than the interaction of brain chemistry. Then there was the metaphysical theory that consciousness is the result of the mind being in two places at once - the past and present - and that our self awareness is the result of placing ourselves in the near future. (All tenses being microseconds apart).

Then there is the belief that it is the electromagnetic field put out by the brain that creates consciousness. And the classical religious definition of man possessing the “spark” of life - a gift from the almighty - that posits consciousness as being evidence of our immortal souls.

But this LaSalle piece is really good stuff. It is generally based on the shocking realization that the universe seems to have been created specifically for life itseslf.

LaSalle explains:

Nowadays science identifies this phenomenon as the observation selection effect, wherein a “selection bias” must be factored in to cosmological measurements.

The gravitational constant is perhaps the most famous [example of the Goldilocks Effect], but the fine structure constant is just as critical for life. Called alpha, if it were just 1.1x or more of its present value, fusion would no longer occur in stars. (p. 87)

The Rare Earth hypothesis narrows the field of habitation down again, until the possibilities become too extreme to believe. In fact, the long odds against your reading this article are so remote as to be practically impossible. Yet, here we are, evidently snug inside the safe wave of the physical present.

You can look it up: “the Goldilocks phenomenon.”

By the late sixties, it had become clear that if the Big Bang had been just one part in a million more powerful, the cosmos would have blown outward too fast to allow stars and worlds to form. Result: no us. Even more coincidentally, the universe’s four forces and all of its constants are just perfectly set up for atomic interactions, the existence of atoms and elements, planets, liquid water, and life. Tweak any of them and you never existed.

Deterministic or random? Were there a trillion Big Bangs prior to the one 14 billion or so years ago where the laws of nature we are familiar with never materialized and the universe kept collapsing back in on itself? Was there a continuously expanding and contracting series of universes until our present universe was created that melded the laws of nature together perfectly so that you can be sitting in your chair reading this?

Or is there indeed an order to the universe that created this “Goldilocks effect” of living in a “just right” reality?

The latter is most attractive to people of faith because it posits a higher power intervening - even if just for a micro-second at the time of the Big Bang - thus proving the existence of God.

At any rate, this “selection bias” is a well known phenomenon in quantum mechanics. The theory of light is a good example. Light, we are told, is both a wave and a particle. But in order to study light, you must choose to observe it as either a wave or particle - you cannot do both.

The famous thought experiment (that riles cat lovers to this day) of Schrodinger’s Cat as explained in Wikpedia:

Schrödinger’s Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.

LaSalle (who is reviewing a new book that explains the theory titled Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe by Robert Lanza) explains the theory this way:

[P]hysical reality is a process in which observation and perception dynamically precede the presence of time and space.

Consciousness creates its own reality.

How this is done is still a mystery. But the provocative idea that consciousness is based on what we observe, that there is no hard and fast reality by which our minds grasp an essential and undeviating truth of existence is elegant, radical, exciting, and scary.

Read LaSalle’s entire piece as well as a lot of the stuff he’s linked to. It will blow your mind - figuratively speaking, of course.

He must be next in line. The GOP poohbahs are lining up with the former Massachusetts governor already and here we are still more than 3 years away from the election.

Patricia Chadwick of CNBC jumps on the Romney bandwagon with both feet:

If the economy is still in limbo, Mitt Romney will have the opportunity of a lifetime. He understands economics; he knows how industry and business should work to thrive; he has had both private and public experience; he even studied and signed into law a health care system. For sure he will be able to talk to its strengths and weaknesses, what it can do and what it cannot do.

In all the political kerfuffle unfolding today, Mitt Romney has gravitas—no sexual scandals, a few grey hairs, a total lack of demagoguery, confidence but not arrogance, an ability to lead successfully and an understanding of the sanctity of the private sector in this country. Those attributes should stand him in good stead when the 2012 Presidential campaign starts to unfold in barely more than a year from now.

Jon Martin of Politico has been tracking the Romney buzz and discovered that the mass of Romney supporters and staffers in the early primary states are already standing by, waiting for the word from on high:

For the Romney team, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the campaign never really ended.

In addition to the full-time employees the former Massachusetts governor has at his Boston-based Free & Strong America PAC, the early primary states and Washington are filled with former staffers and supporters who are in regular contact with one another.

Whenever Romney has a major TV appearance or pens an opinion piece, a PAC staffer, Will Ritter, circulates the news to an e-mail list of the former governor’s extended political family.

The Washington-based alumni have a regular monthly luncheon, are working on another reunion-like event around a 2009 candidate later this year and always make sure their former candidate is briefed on the latest political doings.

When Romney does a high-profile Sunday show like he did yesterday, for example, that means that former communications aides such as Matt Rhoades and Kevin Madden will join PAC spokesman and longtime adviser Eric Fehrnstrom to help prepare their old boss, either in person or over the phone. When he’s delivering a speech, as he did earlier this month on national security, other former campaign officials such as media consultants Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens are brought in.

And when the former governor is in Washington for reasons other than a public appearance, an even broader extended network of advisers is often alerted, including such figures as longtime lobbyist and GOP strategist Ron Kaufman.

Romney enjoys an equally strong following in many of the early primary states.

Long time GOP strategist and former McCain campaign manager Terry Nelson puts it more plainly: “Having run before for president puts you in a better place to run again. He doesn’t have to build an infrastructure or recruit a national fundraising team.”

I made the point on my radio show this past Tuesday that if - and that’s a big “if” - Sarah Palin thinks by resigning her office 2 1/2 years before the primaries begin, that she has a better shot at beating Romney, someone should have told her that not only is Romney so far ahead he is almost out of sight, but that the Republican elites are already touting him as “inevitable.” In other words, it’s Romney’s turn.

Who else is there? Gingrich blows hot and cold, trying to decide if his sky high negatives would get in the way of his ambition to be president. Of the governors, Jindal is too young and too green, Pawlenty is as vanilla as they come, Daniels says he doesn’t want it, Huntsman has been co-opted by Obama, and the rest are even more nondescript or unacceptable in one way or another (Do we really want to elect another Bush or another governor from Texas?)

Rising stars? There are a few. Mark Kirk of Illinois who is probably too moderate on social issues for a shot at the national ticket but who is a very telegenic, articulate spokesman for conservative economic issues, has the luxury of running for either governor or senator. But if elected, he would have to abandon his office almost immediately if he wanted to run for president.

Rob Portman, currently running for the senate from Ohio would have the same problem despite the fact that he is a genius on economic matters and has a nice, comfortable personae about him.

I saw Congressman Paul Ryan at CPAC and listened to a speech he made at a think tank roundtable on conservatism. He is definitely an up and comer but Congressman fare poorly as presidential candidates and besides, Ryan voted for TARP which may disqualify any Republican lawmaker who did so.

Then there’s the curious case of Mike Pence who, it is whispered around the Hill, would love to be president some day. He’s a pretty good speaker and is knowledgeable about a host of issues from the budget, to immigration, to health care. We’ll see how he does as Republican Conference Chairman and go from there. He’s only 50 years old so his national political days may be ahead of him.

Finally, we come to Mike Huckabee who, if elected, would be the first president whose named ended in two vowels. I can’t tell you how much I despise Huckaloser except to say I find great enjoyment and satisfaction in creating new and clever endings for his moniker. Huckapooh would destroy the Republican party if nominated so even though he has his own really dumb TV show, I sincerely hope everyone forgets him by the time the primaries roll around.

So not only is Romney next in line, there literally is no one else — unless Sarah Palin challenges him. This, she might do despite the spectacle she has made of herself this last week. When even Republicans - supporters as well as critics - come down on Palin and dismiss her chances in 2012, you have to wonder if she isn’t running for 2016 or beyond.

Maybe she’ll hit the rubber chicken circuit as Reagan did lo these many years ago. Not only will she command astronomical speaking fees, but she will keep her name and face in front of the faithful. Meanwhile, she would be honing her skills, filling in her extensive knowledge gaps, and generally creating a more serious, more complete candidate. We can only wait and see.

In the meantime, Romney continues to quietly do the spadework necessary for a 2012 run. And the GOP should find more uses for this very talented but flawed man. His critiques of Obama’s policies have been very good with no name calling, solid facts and figures, and his speeches are given with an air of authority few Republicans can match.

There is a slight chance that things will be so bad by the fall of 2011 that someone unknown at this point could sweep to the nomination if they are seen as a knight on a white charger. But that scenario is extremely far fetched. It is very unlikely that a new governor or senator elected in 2010 would abandon their office and almost immediately run for president. Hence, the names mentioned above (along with a few others) are it as far as GOP candidates are concerned.

That really leaves a wide open field for Romney. Even at this early, early, stage the race is his to lose. No one else will have the money or organization to challenge him - especially in the early states. If he is to be brought down, it will be by his own missteps, not by any other candidate surpassing him.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, it will be all Palin all the time as I welcome Jazz Shaw and Melissa Clouthier to talk about the extraordinary events of the last few days.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

President Obama has discovered a spending program he doesn’t like. It’’s crop price supports and other subsidies that go to farmers - most of whom don’t need them or shouldn’t be getting them.

My latest column at American Issues Project examines the outdated notion that farms need and deserve subsidies:

Thank Thomas Jefferson for the nearly $17 billion we taxpayers are forced to shell out every year to subsidize two dozen commodities with price supports, as well as billions more for a complex of interrelated agricultural benefits for everything from crop insurance to irrigation payments.

It was the Sage of Monticello, gentleman farmer, tinkerer, and agricultural scientist, who envisioned an America of “yeoman farmers,” whose industriousness, virtue, devotion to the land, and love of freedom would one day extend coast to coast in an “Empire of Liberty.”

Jefferson offered this vision as a counterweight to Alexander Hamilton’s money grubbing commercial ideas of factory owners and shopkeepers running the country (along with stock jobbers and speculators). The two great visions of America have clashed since our founding, with Hamilton’s ideals eventually winning out.

But the romanticized Jeffersonian vision of the small farmer, battling Mother Nature and the land itself, has never quite died the death it should have. Hence, beginning with the New Deal, farmers have been given special treatment by the government in the form of price supports that place a floor underneath commodity prices. And most of that taxpayer cash goes to “farmers” who are quite far from Jefferson’s yeoman farmer vision. In fact, it was discovered in 2007 that about $1.3 billion in farm aid went to people who didn’t grow or produce any agricultural products at all, while another study in 2008 found that two thirds of the subsidies go to just 10% of all farmers.

Subsidies costs us hundreds of billions in increased food prices, taxes, and lost exports as other nations raise huge tariffs on our farm products to keep them off their grocery shelves. Poor people around the world suffer as well because subsidies not only make food more expensive but also drive them off the land because they cannot compete with western industrialized agriculture.

Read the whole thing.

Inconstancy? Or proof of the never ending individual quest for enlightenment?

There is, abroad on both sides of the ideological divide, a prejudice against anyone who stakes out a position on an issue and then alters their thinking on that issue when new information or a new reality presents itself. Changing one’s mind is a no-no and is either a sign of a weak will or worse, a lack of courage to stick to one’s “convictions.”

When re-examining the underlying assumptions which form the basis for rational thinking on any issue, the mind changer is denigrated as a cowardly wretch, a loser, an insincere fake. I am not saying it is an occasion for congratulations or a pat on the back. But the disapprobation associated with sincerely altering one’s views based on a rational re-analysis of one’s thinking is disturbing.

The political internet places a premium on closed mindedness, rewarding those who march in lockstep with the group. Deviation from the Party Line is discouraged by a loss of prestige and respect, and a consequent loss in readers and links. Any blogger can tell you this is true. More recently, some conservative commentators and pundits have learned the truth of this convention when they “strayed” from conservative dogma and embraced a more independent line of thinking.

Certainly, I am not trying to advance the idea that disagreements over politics and policies should not be vigorous and sustained. But criticizing someone simply because they changed their mind on an issue? Something is wrong with that picture - at least the way I have been encouraged to think over my lifetime. I tried to put this into words several times over the nearly 5 years I have been blogging but probably lack the intellectual chops to get it right.

This was my latest attempt from a few months ago:

I return once again to the theme of making this site a “Blog of Self-Discovery” or, the “Writings of the Self-Absorbed Man” if you prefer. In truth, after more than 4 years of struggle, I am in many ways, more of a stranger in my minds eye than I was when I began this journey of self criticism; challenging everything I believe, forcing me to justify the underlying assumptions of my philosophy to my own satisfaction.

Although it should be the goal of any examined life to make such a quest a lifelong pursuit, it is a journey that is best begun when one is young, I think. At age 55, one has lived too much, experienced too much, seen too much, lived and loved and lost too much to retain the suppleness of mind that can process and absorb the terabytes of information we mainline every day. Can we recognize what all of this data is doing to us, how it is changing us, why it challenges our long and comfortably held assumptions as new insights are gleaned and new directions in thought are explored?

For those handful of you who have taken seriously my earnest but woefully inadequate attempts to put into words the “velocity of my thoughts” on the nature of man, of conservatism, and the threads of history and the evolution of man’s relationship to the state that seeks to find a complementary connection between them, please bear with me over the next few days as I attempt to explain the insights that have been granted to me recently.

What brought this subject to the fore was a link from Instapundit I received today where Glenn Reynolds made note of my change of mind on the value of tea parties. He linked to this post that contains my original thoughts on the first efforts of the tea party movement last February.

Reynolds took me to task for that post, writing “If this keeps up (and I think it just might) the amateurishness will fade away soon enough. Then Moran will probably complain about the loss of authenticity.”

My post was too snarky by half and not very well thought out. I vividly recall the reason for that snark, however; there were 9,000 conservative activists at CPAC in Washington, D.C. and yet the tea party in Lafayette Square during the conference drew a measly 300 participants. The disconnect between the rhetoric promising a “new American revolution” sweeping the country with paltry turnouts elsewhere also drew my criticism.

Since then, I have changed my mind on the tea parties and believe them useful. Why? Because the underlying assumptions I had originally formulated that informed my position changed dramatically. The April 15th protests showed massive growth in numbers and the dynamism of the movement. And yet, the criticism I received then (as well as Reynold’s implied criticism of my change of heart today) was not about the substance of my argument but rather the fact I had simply accepted a new reality and altered my beliefs accordingly.

At the time last April, even Reynolds agreed with my critique that the tea parties were amateurish and disorganized. We differed on the belief that they would grow into something significant. My fault was in underestimating the organizers, not in analyzing what went on at the actual events.

To be wrong is human. But admitting error or admitting a change of heart on the political internet gives most commenters leave to question your intelligence, your principles, even your integrity. It doesn’t matter if the underlying assumptions you originally used to justify a position become irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if new information comes to light to challenge your beliefs. You are supposed to ignore this and “stay the course.”

This is counterintuitive thinking as far as I’m concerned. And it is destructive of rational discussion of issues big and small. But as long as this mindless group think dominates both sides of the ideological divide, there will be little independent thought to temper the extremes of right and left nor will there be room for consensus to solve the problems that are bedeviling us.