Sage Brocklebank, who plays "Buzz McNab", is a friend of mine--nice to see he's still getting a steady paycheck..

Let's start changing the vocabulary here--"brokered" suggests some "deal" being reached by party insiders, and presented as a fait accompli to the delegates in Tampa.

We must start to refer to a "deadlocked" convention. This slight change suggests that the delegates cannot give any one candidate 51% of the vote on the first ballot. Hence, the DELEGATES need to consider alternatives--not "party bosses".

After all, the bosses and insiders are the guys who tried to foist Romney on us in the first place. Who wants them taking a second bite of the apple?

Fun fact: The disputed election of 1876 gave this country another one hundred years of tumult and suffering. The popular vote totals in several states manifested in extraordinarily close margins between the two major candidates. A special commission was appointed to sort it all out--50% of whom were Republican appointees, 50% Dems. Naturally, they deadlocked.

This whole disaster finally was resolved by "The Compromise of 1877", in which the Dems agreed to acquiesce to the Hayes victory--but only on the condition that Federal troops be withdrawn from the southern states--which effectively ended Reconstruction, and allowed the South to deny the freed slaves their full civil rights for another century.

For which President Rutherford B. Hayes deserves to rot in hell.

I wish we could get away from the term, "brokered convention". That conjures up all the hackneyed imagery--the "smoke-filled rooms", the "power-brokers", etc.

Could we not just instead think about a "deadlocked" convention? If I'm not mistaken, most delegates are legally required to vote for their pledged candidate on the first ballot. If no candidate has a majority after that first vote, it becomes a free-for-all, with delegates for one candidate trying to woo those originally pledged to another. If no candidate is able to pull in enough support to get over the top, let the call for a new candidate come from the floor, rather than the Mitch McConnell elite RINOs.

Can you see it now? True democracy in action. "We want Sarah! We want Sarah!'". "Christie is the one!" "Jindal/Daniels! There's the ticket!", etc, etc...

In order for this to happen though, delegate counts would have to be pretty well fragmented. If Romney comes into the convention with 40% (or fewer) of the pledged delegates, a scenario like this has a chance to play out. If he instead comes in with something like 48%, you can be sure that there will be tremendous pressure on Newt and Rick to release their delegates from their commitment. The same sort of thing happened with the Dems in '76--Carter had not quite 50% going into that convention, but Scoop Jackson, Mo Udall, and the rest of that bunch released their delegates, so that Jimmy could be coronated easily.

I'm a big Prager fan also. For whatever reason, he doesn't have nearly as large of a "footprint" here in the East as he does elsewhere in the country. I first discovered him back in the 90s, when he briefly had a two-hour daily slot on WABC-AM. At around the same time, he briefly had a gig with a syndicated TV show, which never caught on. It seemed like it was trying to be the Right's answer to the then-popular Phil Donahue. I do still try to catch Prager when he does a guest appearance on Hannity, or read his columns or books on occasion.

I'm even less familiar with Adam Carolla, but I do like what I've seen and heard. This seems to be something of a trend: Take two talk radio/talk TV guys with somewhat differing points of view, and stick 'em out on the road together, a la Beck/O'Reilly.

Totally with ya on the main premise, Joel. One minor point on which I disagree: I know that McCain's decision to "suspend his campaign" to go running back to Washington to vote in favor of TARP struck everybody as somewhat nutty. I agree that it was nutty; but only because he did nothing to stand in the way of the fore-ordained bailout.

I keep saying this and will maintain that I am right: Whether or not McCain believed in the need for TARP (or even understood the arguments for or against it--which I doubt, as economics was not "his strong suit" as he often admitted), he could easily have "suspended his campaign", gone to DC, made some noise about "bailouts for the wealthy, but not for Joe the Plumber", etc, and voted against it. The damn thing was going to pass with or without him, so this would have been a shrewd tactical political maneuver.

He and Sarah could have pulled a Harry Truman, going on a populist-oriented campaign against the "Beltway insiders and their backroom deals". The original message that was sent by bringing Palin in as VP would have been amplified and fleshed-out. In a stunning bit of political jiu jitsu, he would have sent the message that he and his running mate were the true outsiders (24 years in the Senate notwithstanding), and paint BHO as the same old same old, in one master stroke.

A tragically lost opportunity. McCain was a flawed candidate, sure. But there is no way that America would be seen as the laughingstock of the world, seemingly everywhere in retreat, as is the case today.

I'd love a deadlocked convention that turns to Sarah after failing to choose between Mitt and Rick. It would be invigorating, refreshing...and it would make the MSM's heads explode. All good things.

All this "cut the cable" stuff sounds great--in theory. But what am I supposed to do when I want to watch Red Eye? That's an FNC show, and there's only one way to get FNC programming, and that's cable (or satellite). I share your desire to not support MSNBC, but as a professional investor, its sister network, CNBC is sort of a must-have, also.

Believe me, the day a la carte pricing becomes available to me, I'll sign up...

As with so many others, I too wish we could somehow get Mr. Hannan over here and run him for POTUS--sadly, that's never going to happen...

The one thing I don't understand is why he appears not to be an MP in the British House of Commons. He made that famous speech criticizing Gordon Brown in the EU parliament. When it became an Internet sensation, many opined that he would one day be Prime Minister of England; unfortunately, party structure and seniority are much more important in the British system than ours. In order to be Prime Minister, you have to put in your time in the House of Commons as a back-bencher and work your way up--Barack Obama-types simply can't happen there.

I think it would be wonderful for the UK and for the world if Daniel Hannan were ever to become PM--but he's not going to get there from Brussels (face it--if he could, he would vote tomorrow to dissolve the EU and/or to withdraw the UK from the EU--either of which would put him out of a job on the spot).

If you're not going to go for PM, Daniel, how 'bout moving to the States and putting in the time to become Governor of Pennsylvania or something? Christie, Walker, et al, need all the help they can get.....

An excellent new topic for occasional discussion here, Andrew. I hope in posts to come, we can get into the nitty-gritty of comparing the relatively conservative original series with the NextGen/Picard version and the later spinoffs.

I cringed when Capt. Picard first encountered the new "villains" of the new 24th century--the Ferengi. "Heh, heh, what can we trade for, Picard Captain?", as they greedily rubbed their palms while sniveling in their short bodies with the large noses ears. How much more unsubtly anti-Semitic could they have been? Remember the episode of TNG where they found the three cryogenically preserved humans from the 20th century, and all one of them wanted was a copy of the Wall Street Journal, so he could see how his stock market investments had performed? Picard: "This is the 24th century. We don't need money". So evolved they were in their 24th century socialist utopia, weren't they?

Somehow money re-asserted itself in a vengeance on Deep Space Nine (a much better show than NextGen), with the previously comic relief/evil Ferengi and their "gold-pressed latinum" economy becoming quite important. Amazingly, the writers had realized that socialist utopias sound great--until you have to imagine how such a society could possibly operate in real life, with we flawed humanoids at the helm.....

Uh-huh. But don't foret the timely references from the 21st century: "The Bible. The Code of Hammurabi. And Justinian. The Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights. The Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies!".

They always threw one or two of those in there. :)