NOTEBOOK: Get ready for the epic snoozer of Obama vs. Romney

By David McElroy · February 1, 2012

Cleaning out the notebook again…

I’m not sure what to say about the Florida GOP results that I haven’t already said over and over again. Barring something completely unexpected, Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. The fall choice will be progressive vs. progressive lite.”

I continue to hear from my Ron Paul-supporting friends that he still has a chance to win. No, he doesn’t. I have more chance of being struck by lightning than he does of winning. A friend accused me Tuesday night of being negative, but it has nothing to do with that. It’s just a hard, cold analysis of the facts. Neither Paul nor anybody else selling libertarian ideas has any chance of winning anytime soon. That’s not what people want.

People don’t understand basic economics. I’m reminded of that frequently. The latest example comes from a couple who live on my street. They had their house on the market for months and months. They had one offer, but that offer was for $20,000 less than the asking price, so they declined it and the house is now off the market.

They talked to me a few days ago about this situation, and the wife kept saying, “I’m just not going to give it away. It’s worth what we’re asking. People just want you to give it to them because prices are down.” No, seriously. I’m not making this up. People don’t understand that something is worth what a willing seller will take and a willing buyer will pay. The value from a few years ago is irrelevant. What they prefer to get is irrelevant. This very nice woman is angry at potential buyers — who she sees as trying to cheat her. She doesn’t understand the market. Sadly, this is the way most people think. It’s the kind of ignorance that leads to wage and price controls, as well as laws to control all sorts of things instead of letting the market work as it’s supposed to. It’s that ignorance that’s leading us to financial ruin.

I saw a Newt Gingrich ad on a television in public Tuesday where I couldn’t hear the audio very well. Just seeing the video made me wonder for the longest whether it was a parody, though. It’s hard for me to believe that these vague, keyword-driven ads work, but I know they do — because I spent years doing the print version of them. It’s scary to realize just how stupid many swing voters are. It happened to be a Gingrich ad, but an ad for almost any campaign would have seemed just as devoid of substance. I had to admit that some of the pictures of Gingrich, though, were playing into the stories about how much he’s in love with himself.

It would be an improvement if we put the Keystone Kops in charge of border security instead of the Department of Homeland Security. The morons at DHS can’t figure out what’s a legitimate threat and what’s just a pop culture reference. A couple of British tourists were denied entrance to the country in Los Angeles because one of the two had been talking on Twitter — in slang and pop culture references — to the pair’s U.S. visit.

The first offending tweet to another person said, “free this week for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.” The second one quoted TV show Family Guy in saying, “‘3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!” The idiots at DHS thought the pair were coming to the area to dig up Monroe’s body. Seriously. Yes, they really do appear to be that stupid. Instead of understanding that they were dealing with slang and pop culture, the pair were denied entrance to the country.

If you want a laugh — especially if you ever deal with middle school-age kids — here’s something from the Onion that might do the trick. It’s about Oregon parents who have petitioned a court of the right to terminate the life of their brain-dead 13-year-old daughter who is no longer capable of doing anything except texting on her phone and making occasional grunts and eye-rolls.

For the many people who’ve sent kind and supportive messages, I’m doing very, very well after surgery Monday. I had no right to expect that it could possibly go as well as it did or that recovery could start as smoothly as it has. For those who are interested in the details — and a few other thoughts I’ve had along the way lately — I’ll be writing something to wrap up this episode very soon.

I really do want you to know that I deeply appreciate the support I’ve had from many of you. In addition to regulars who I already knew, I’ve also heard from some of you who I’ve discovered have been lurking in the shadows without saying anything. No matter what category you’re in, I love and appreciate every one of you. Thank you.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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