Pawlenty: first best hope for GOP in 2012?

No doubt about it: Tim Pawlenty is a dork. Maybe, that's why ip has said for at least a year that he is going to be the GOP's guy.

He ordered the violent crackdown on Amy Goodman and her staff at Democracy Now! during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul making him unacceptable to progressives while bolstering his cred with the Fascista wing of his own party. He appeared with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show in January and defended the decisions he made at that time.

As a Minnesota Public Radio devotee, ip knows his career pretty well so it was giddily affirming when David Brooks announced in a less than enthusiastic appraisal last night on All Things Considered, that the former governor is just dull enough to match the requirements for the kind of candidate that the GOP wants to run against President Obama in 2012. Pawlenty has established an extensive series of base camps in Iowa in what some have called an "all in" effort.

Not too surprisingly as governor, he filed suit against PPACA. In a recent interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep, Pawlenty phrased his state's health care strategy like this:

"Don't just say we're going to pay you for endless volumes of procedures," Pawlenty said. "We've got to start paying them for better health, and better health care outcomes. And that's what we've done in Minnesota. And when you do those kinds of things, even in the primitive or early-stage ways that we've done it, it's extremely promising and it works." Pawlenty was referring to an experiment in Minnesota that bundles medical services into so-called "baskets of care." Providers who create baskets for conditions like diabetes or asthma receive a single, comprehensive payment that covers all of their services -- rather than individual payments for individual office visits. Bundling care into baskets or packages gives providers an incentive to get their patients healthy as soon as possible. If they do, they'll make more money. If they don't, they're on the hook for any costs that exceed the bundled payment.

Face it: the GOP is NOT going to nominate a Mormon who is little more than a cockered DC gadfly added to a slasher movie CPAC casting call for the role of Ronny Reag-urgitate in something like, "2012: The White Elephants Trumpet" though he will likely win New Hampshire, but then falter in South Carolina and beyond.

Sorry, hipneck, Ron Paul is a fun guy; but, he's not electable mostly because he's not a governor and is perceived by the Reagan voters (read, old) to have contracted DC disease. Jeb Bush, having appeared with the President at a recent gala, is being fitted with a virtual pair of concrete galoshes. Allahu akbar.

Veep? John Thune's neighboring failed red state doesn't have enough electoral votes. ip's hunch?  Unless Tiny Tim can enlist the oxymoronical "qualified Republican woman," (as if there was a qualified Republican man) watch for Florida's Marco Rubio's eyes to begin sparkling since running two governors seems incomprehensible.

ps: start listening for noises about normalizing relations with Cuba.

So far, at least 87 dolphins have washed up onto Gulf shores in an "unprecedented mortality event:"




ip's ideas for helping high schools race to the top:

1) middle schools should be eliminated.
2) high schools should insist on business casual except on Fridays.
3) girls and boys, women and men in public schools should be instructed in separate classrooms
4) school boards should have an elected representative from the high school student population
5) teachers must be union members
6) districts should have the flexibility to experiment with curricula, including year-round sessions
7) American Indian languages should meet the world language requirement

Conventional warheads atop ICBMs, the concept I wrote Tom Daschle about in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War is still on the table.

New link: NOAA current US Fire Weather Map.