Happy Easter!

What the hell?

Someone with too much time on their hands made a really disturbing parody of a Japanese Furby ad:

Good lord... I'll never be able to look at a Furby quite the same way again.

Mitt Romney's speech at CPAC 2013

Here's Mitt Romney speaking at CPAC, with an introduction from Nikki Haley:

Except for the part where he praises that worthless piece of crap Chris Christie, I thought it was actually a pretty good speech.  But try telling that to the folks who are still 100% convinced that Obama=Romney and fly into a rage every single time they so much as hear Romney's name being mentioned.  (By the way, where's all the outrage about Donald Trump speaking at CPAC?  Is being a birther all it takes to get called a conservative these days?)

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "'Yes We Can' – Al-Qaeda’s English Mag Publishes Wanted Dead or Alive List" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Victor Davis Hanson's post "Why Do Societies Give Up?" over at Private Papers.  Congrats!

Update: Last week's winners can be found here.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here...

Remember when everyone was in love with Chris Christie because he yelled at some idiot teacher?  Yeah... not so much anymore, huh?  At this point he probably has a better chance of running for president as a Democrat than he does as a Republican.

Just recently I was hearing some folks on the right seriously pushing the idea of Ben Carson running for president in 2016, after hearing the man give only one speech.  He seems like a decent enough fellow, but is that really all it takes these days to get Republicans excited about somebody?  There was a time when Republicans looked at our governorships to find potential candidates with executive experience and a decent record of accomplishments; now it seems like all you have to do is somehow manage to say something vaguely conservative out loud and we all go nuts.

Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster of the Brennan nomination got Republicans even more excited than Ben Carson did.  I admit it was nice seeing someone spend an entire day holding President Obama's feet to the fire on something, even if it was a bit of a straw man argument.  (Does anyone really think Obama was planning to attempt a drone strike on American citizens on our own soil?)

I do appreciate that the filibuster helped to draw attention to Obama's completely incoherent policy on the use of drones (seriously, why is it ok to blow up random groups of people just to kill one guy, but not ok to throw water on the face of one particular guy?) but I'm not crazy about the idea of Rand Paul running for president in 2016, or 2020, or ever.  I hate so say it, but as incoherent as Obama's policy on drones may be, I'm still much closer to Obama on drones than I am to Rand Paul.  The point of the filibuster was supposedly an objection to one particular very extreme drone scenario, but after all of Rand Paul's talk about "perpetual war" I really wonder if there is any drone scenario that he wouldn't object to.  Rand may not be his father, but he's still his father's son.

Call me a RINO.  Call me a neocon.  Call me whatever you want.  I'm never going to be comfortable with the idea of a presidential candidate that comes from the Code Pink wing of the Republican Party.  I'm glad that Rand Paul is in the Senate, but that's as far as it goes; anyone who would vote to confirm Chuck Hagel has no business being commander-in-chief.

(By the way, please don't read any of this as a defense of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.  I think they are both idiots.)