Cheap shots and hog balls

Via Newser.

Sick of Bushes? Vote for Jeb!

Jeb Bush seems to have gotten all his friends to tell Peter Baker of the New York Times that he is so not George W. Bush that he's literally the only option for Republicans who want to make sure they're not renominating George W.:

“You come away amazed that these two guys could be so different and be brothers,” said Jim Towey, a former Florida official who became so close to Jeb Bush that their families spent Thanksgivings together and who went on to work in George W. Bush’s White House directing faith-based initiatives. “I love them both. But they’re just very different people.”

Teen Mitt Romney. Fictional image by Justin Bishop for Vanity Fair.

Sick of capitalists? Vote for Mitt!

Of course Romney can do better than that. He's arguing basically that he's the only Republican candidate who isn't Romney, with his leadership in the struggle to put an end to poverty and inequality, to the admiration of Dan Balz and Philip Rucker at Wapo:

In his last campaign, Romney was hampered by an image, pushed by the Democrats, that he was a wealthy business executive who was out of touch with ordinary Americans. On Friday, he seemed determined to send a signal that he would try to deal with that problem from the start, should he run.

“It’s a tragedy -- a human tragedy – that the middle class in this country by and large doesn’t believe the future won’t be better than the past or their kids will have a brighter future of their own,” Romney said. He added, “People want to see rising wages and they deserve them.”

How those hack journalists could have taken him for a wealthy business executive I'll never know. Anyway, now he's going to be the anti-poverty candidate! Or he thinks he is. Doesn't know himself all that well, he suggests, but he's asked Mrs. Romney, and she says he is:

“She knows my heart in a way that few people do,” he said. “She’s seen me not just as a business guy and a political guy, but for over 10 years as you know I served as a pastor for a congregation and for groups of congregations... She’s seen me work with folks that are looking for better work and jobs and providing care for the sick and the elderly. She knows where my heart is.”

He's the candidate against poverty for the Latter-Day Saints! If you care about the curse of Mormon underemployment, sick Mormons, and Mormons getting old, you know what to do.

Hog balls

Steve M is worried that the GOP vice presidential candidate could end up being Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, the Agenda 21 nut and nullificationist representative of the conservative tinfoil sector, rehabilitated by her winningness and enthusiastically described by a heavy-breathing The Hill:

The motorcycle-riding, gun-toting, self-described “farm girl” is also the first female combat veteran to ever serve in the Senate — and the first woman to ever win a race for federal office in Iowa.

But I figure the real reason she's been elected to present the Republican response to the State of the Union message on Tuesday is that whom the GOPs wish to destroy they first invite to follow Obama's act, and then drug them before they go on the air to produce some moment of unforgettable puerility to match Jindal's doped-looking bewilderment (when he brought up Hurricane Katrina as an example of how Republicans should be in power)

or an apparently valium-addled Cathy McMorris Rodgers thinking the idea of "empowering people" was some kind of dark joke

or Rubio's panicked amphetamine thirst

If we're lucky, Ernst will have had some of the same special brownies she had on Election Night and start laughing, and we'll know she's a psychopathic killer and the balls she is aiming at are ours: