WHERE TO BEGIN? “Not exactly a ‘celebrity,’ per se, but it’s pretty clear that Stalin was the original hipster.”

From the photo essay, “20 Celebrities Who Used To Be Hot.”

“RELATIVE CHAOS” defines the GOP presidential race, according to Chris Cillizza, and unless Mitch Daniels, the “serious person,” enters it — with his “considerable gravity” — “unpredictability” will “almost certainly continue unabated” and we will be left with “considerable flux.” Oh, no! The almost certain relative chaos and considerable flux! Save us, Mitch! Save us!

THE LEARNING CURVE OF PRESIDENTS: Paul Greenberg writes:

There’s nothing like bitter experience to test glib theories. But presidents can be remarkably slow learners, such is the power of their more cherished — and fixed — ideas.

Following those ideas over the cliff tends to reduce politicians to explaining why their policies were really right all along, no matter how wrong they proved in practice. See Jimmy Carter — or, for that matter, Jefferson Davis. The first, and last, president of the Confederate States of America could still fill up two unreadable volumes explaining why his constitutional theories were absolutely right — even as he stood amid the ruins his theories had wrought.

Other leaders wake up just in time to shake off their delusions, reverse course, and avoid the worst.

Read the whole thing.™

CONNECT THE DOTS.

THE TWITTER CURSE. Did it get James Durbin?

THERE’S A REASON WHY HIS FIRST NAME IS RAND: On Thursday evening, Matt Drudge and Real Clear Politics featured a video of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on socialized medicine:

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.”

Presumably Think Progress is having kittens over Paul’s quote, since they clipped it for YouTube. But in response, all I can do is shrug and quote from Dr. Hendricks: “Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce.”

OBAMA: NOBODY MESSES WITH JOE BIDEN! OSAMA: FEH.

I’M NOT GOING TO FREAK, I’M GOING TO TWEET. Blogger is having problems… to the point where, if you try to go to my blog, you’ll get a message saying it’s removed. According to Blogger Status, they’re working on it. Fortunately, there’s Twitter, and I’m going to hang out there. And there’s also Instapundit, at least for a little while longer. Until Glenn wakes up. Hopefully, Glenn will wake up, and Blogger will wake up very soon.

INDIVIDUALITY IS FINE, AS LONG AS WE ALL DO IT TOGETHER.

When did Frank Burns move to the far left?

WOODY ALLEN’S TEA PARTY RANT: Whether it’s the Republican bashing in 1996’s Everybody Says I Love You*, or Woody’s soon to be released film, whose sclerotic sucker punch Kyle Smith of the New York Post details at his blog, if Woody’s onscreen mouthpieces have a political meltdown, you know the GOP has recently taken one or more houses of Congress. That’s a very minor, if delicious incentive for the Tea Party and the rest of the GOP next year.

* Which yes, I saw. Believe it or not, I didn’t completely bail on Woody until after The Curse of the Jade Scorpion in the summer of 2001.

CRONY CAPITALISM: If you want a federal contract, better be nice to Obama.

Meanwhile, the more or less private sector proffers some advice that’s remarkably likely to be ignored: “Stop stepping on employers and they will step up, Mr. President.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: “To listen to many bien pensant American intellectuals and above-the-salt journalists, America faces a shocking problem today: the cluelessness, greed, arrogance and bigotry of the American public.” I can certainly see the appeal of believing everyone is dumb except for me and my colleagues and friends—especially as I belong to one of the “elite” professions myself—but I’m afraid Mead is right when he says, “it is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.”

EU TO REIMPOSE INTERNAL BORDER PASSPORT CONTROLS:  Wow. This is big. “European nations moved to reverse decades of unfettered travel across the continent when a majority of EU governments agreed the need to reinstate national passport controls amid fears of a flood of immigrants fleeing the upheaval in north Africa.” I suppose that it could face push-back in the European parliament. However, the Guardian notes that “15 of the 22 EU states which had signed up to Schengen supported the move, with only four resisting, according to officials and diplomats present.”  The rest of the Guardian article frames this as in keeping with the rise of wicked xenophobic right-wing parties in Europe.  But the simpler explanation might be that much of this is not from far right xenophobes, but from perfectly normal centrist European voters who inchoately understand (and Guardian writers are not wont to do), as Friedman said, you can have open borders or you can have a welfare state, but you can’t have both.

ROMNEY’S HUNT FOR CORPORATE CASH TAKES A HIT — FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: “And the timing couldn’t be worse. Romney’s out scrounging for cash on Wall Street and here the in-house paper for the financial industry rips him to shreds,” Jennifer Rubin writes at the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, regarding Romney’s speech on Thursday, Jonah Goldberg is concise: “It was a sincere, intelligent, cogent, informed political disaster:”

The essence of Romney’s position is: I stand by my successful healthcare plan in Massachusetts, but ObamaCare is a disaster because it does all of the things that RomneyCare does, just on a national level. So, if I am elected president I will give waivers to states so they can repeat my mistakes if they want to, or, if they are smart, they will reject both my approach and Obama’s.

But his hair was perfect.

In case you missed it, the WSJ op-ed is here.

FUTURE CHALLENGES IN NATIONAL SECURITY AND LAW: Essays from members of the Hoover Institution Task Force, edited and introduced by Peter Berkowitz.  Includes short policy essays on a wide array of national security topics from Ben Wittes, Jack Goldsmith, Jessica Stern, Philip Bobbitt, Tod Lindberg, Matthew Waxman, and Kenneth Anderson.

MARY McCONNELL ON DEATH TO HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASS:  My earlier post on this generated quite a lot of email – more than anything I’ve posted this week, in fact – and so I asked one high school teacher who herself blogs on high school writing issues to give me a short statement, which I’ve put up below the fold at the original post.  (I met Mary McConnell seated between her and her husband at a Stanford Law School dinner, and I rather rudely paid Professor McConnell no attention at all, riveted as I was by what his wife was telling me about teaching composition and rhetoric, because it was so much my experience as a parent of a high-schooler.)

THE GREAT BOOKS ACCORDING TO ME:  Guatemala: Eterna Primavera, Eterna Tirania, by Jean-Marie Simon.  My Beloved Wife, as it happens, who spent nearly ten years as a war photographer and journalist in the 1980s Guatemalan civil war.  WW Norton brought out her photo book on the war in Guatemala in 1988, and this is the first version in Spanish, published last year in Guatemala, with new printings of the photos and a newly revised text.  You don’t need to read Spanish to get the photos; they document a brutal civil war, both in the urban areas and out in the countryside, with the army and with the guerrillas.  But strikingly, with the passage of time, these photos have also become a rare collection of photographs of ordinary life in Guatemala during the 1980s, quite apart from the war; urban and rural settings that no longer exist or have been greatly altered.

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGITY-JIG: Well, I’m back after an extended — and much-needed — offline interval. Regular blogging won’t resume until tomorrow, though, as I’m pretty wiped. Guestbloggers are welcome — and encouraged — to stick around until then!

AT AMAZON, up to 60% off on kitchen fixtures.

MOST POLITICALLY INCORRECT NOVEL?: I don’t think I’ll put this under “Great Books According to Me,” although I do think it is pretty great.  Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, by Timothy Mo. This follows on my post on AA Gill and Mark Steyn which, I see, got a citation on Steyn’s website as “reader of the day.”  I should think so.

As for Timothy Mo … It’s not that the novel opens with a scene of coprophilia that makes it politically incorrect (any “transgressive” artist, or South Park, can do that).  Nor even that the coprophilia involves a professor from Germany (though apparently Mo’s refusal to alter that opening lost him his publisher, hence his self-publication under “Paddleless Press”).

‘Politically incorrect’ is more than just saying things to one’s followers that others find offensive, and it is more than simply offending people.  It is a knowing assertion that is calculated to find its target; it is just an updated form of epate-ing la bourgeoisie in a society in which the bourgeoisie that matters happens to be of a vaguely leftish, progressivist variety. In that regard, Mo’s book is numero uno.  I paraphrase from memory the (London) Spectator’s quite astute review when it came out:  ‘A novel that appears to have been written expressly to annoy John Pilger … an example in that very rare genre, the work of genuinely successful reactionary art.’ So.  You had me at “expressly to annoy John Pilger.”

SGT. BARACK! You’ve bought the action figure, now read the comic book, in case you run out of two-fisted Perpetual War adventure ideas. An Insta-reader has a little fun with Photoshop; soon to be a major motion picture!

Click to enlarge:

Meanwhile, in the “real” world of comic books, Superman somehow overcomes his recent anti-Americanism, decides to be in favor of Truth, Justice, and All That Other Stuff* once again.

* To coin a phrase.

THIS IS LIKE – LIKE – LIKE THE HAIKU OF ANGST.  And despair.  3eanuts. (h/t the corner.)

PINCH BITES MAN: “NYT attacks for-profit colleges, beclowns itself again.”

I CERTAINLY HOPE SO: Obama Moving Towards Regime Change in Syria

WHITHER JIHAD? by Reuel Marc Gerecht is your required reading this evening.