Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of South Carolina will be another Mitt Romney win in the face of a plethora of attacks.  Actually, that’s not interesting at all.  There has been nothing even remotely interesting about the Republican primary or the process that they have for picking a President and I’ve spent the longest time trying to figure out why and then I realized that I really don’t care.  No one who cares about anything tangible cares about the Republican primary.  That’s because we’re fixated on this thing called the real world.  It’s a place that most people live in and it’s a place where the ultra-conservative plans of the most conservative politicians on the face of the globe don’t effect us because unless something calamitous happens, they won’t be in a position to be in a position of power.

Someone asked me during the Saints-49ers game where the President got his business experience.  My answer was: he doesn’t have any nor does he need any.  He’s the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, the leader of the free world, and he creates jobs not by eliminating everyone else’s job, but by creating an environment in which prosperity can occur.  Don’t let the Mitt Romney argument fool you.  Romney, on a good day, will say that he created 100,000 jobs.  That’s great until he goes up against President Obama, who has created 2.9 million thus far.  Yeah, that 100,000 figure doesn’t look so hot up against the figure that can be created by putting together a regulatory structure that makes sense, a tax structure that has a track record of working, a new health care plan that will save trillions of dollars over the next ten years and a pro-business payroll tax holiday that has employers hiring at the fastest rate since before the Great Recession.  This election is a joke.  If Republicans wanted to beat the President, they’d put forward a candidate that wasn’t a punchline.

Republicans are going to attack the President under the same false pretenses that they’ve been attacking him along all along.  They’ll call him a European style socialist when in fact, his tax structure is more center-right than anything else.  Tax cuts for businesses that hire?  That’s a Republican idea.  A payroll tax holiday?  That’s a Republican idea.  If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…you see where I’m going with this?  They can say that his foreign policy is one of appeasement, but which President took out Osama Bin Laden?  Which President got our troops out of Iraq?  At the end of the day, there is no plausible argument to deny the President a second term.  The only reasonable argument that can be made is that our economy is not growing as fast as we would like, but good luck getting everything you want and more especially after the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression.  It’s nice to think that things fix themselves overnight and that business leaders make great political leaders, but wishing for things doesn’t make them come true.

In the next election we’re going to have a choice.  We can vote for a President that has led our nation since the most difficult times militarily since Vietnam, the most economically depressed since the Great Depression and the most politically polarizing since FDR.  At the end of the day it’s an argument for the other guy or an argument for the guy you’ve got and as things stand there’s a pretty good argument for the guy we’ve got and a pretty lousy one for the guy we don’t.

The truth is that in all likelihood we’re going to elect a Progressive President and a reactionary Congress.  How is that supposed to work?  We’ll have a President ready to lead us into the 21st century and a Congress that will fight him tooth and nail to get there.  How is that moving us forward?  The simple answer is that it’s not.  It’s just about the worst decision the American people could make, but they’re going to make it anyway.  Not because they’re unreasonable, pathological, or clinically insane, but because they don’t like having to make tough choices, so, like most people, they don’t.  They make the easy choice.  Can we blame them for that?  Sure.  Should we blame them for that?  I don’t know.  Most of the voters I know like their Congressman and think that he/she is doing the best they can for them, but when it comes to Congress as a whole, they can’t launch enough bad words at them to save their lives.  I agree with former Speaker of the House Thomas Reed who said that: “they never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.”  That’s harsh, but when you look at the things they’ve done this year, what exactly have they added to our discourse?  The only thing they’ve added is precedent.

They’ve created a precedent to arbitrarily lower our credit rating and create a global panic over something that was routine procedure in the past.  They’ve passed a budget that would end Medicare as we know it, all the while giving tax breaks to oil companies at the expense of our nations’ seniors, low-income families, and veterans.  If you were to look up “scumbag” in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure you’d see a picture of the U.S. capital building and House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell welcoming you with open arms.  This should be a running tagline in a joke, but instead it’s what we call our government.  It’s dysfunctional, it’s petty, it’s annoying and this November most of us are going to vote to keep them in office for another two years.  So when you go to the voting booth and vote for one party for one office and another for something else, just keep in mind that all the dysfunction that you complain about you just voted to keep going.  We’re a reality show nation, we love to watch painful things unfold and this year, like 2010, we’re going to vote for another reality show Congress.

Someone was trying to explain to me earlier that the early exit poll data meant that Huntsman did well.  Excuse me while I spend the next ten minutes laughing at your youthful ignorance.  He’d be the strongest in the GOP field to challenge the President this year, which is precisely why he doesn’t stand a chance at getting the nomination.  The real tragedy in New Hampshire was the sudden fall of Rick Santorum.  Just last week he gave a pretty good speech in Iowa where he talked about his Grandfather, then he lost it and compared the current election to stopping Mussolini.  The President does not = Il Duce and he never will.  Newt Gingrich said that it was people like him that kept America from things like Auschwitz.  What is with this rhetoric comparing people to fascist leaders?  Isn’t the rhetoric comparing the President to a socialist enough for the right?  Apparently not.

What was amazing about Mitt Romney’s victory speech Tuesday night was that he went after Republicans who were going after his record just days after he did the same thing to his fellow Republican, Newt Gingrich.  As Newt explained in the debate on Sunday, Mitt’s bologna has a first name and it is P-i-o-u-s.  Mr. Romney said that he wouldn’t apologize for being rich and that people shouldn’t be envious of those who have money.  Neither side would disagree with that, what they will disagree with is the manner in which he made his money.

Mitt Romney is the Nick Naylor of American business.  He made his money basically selling cigarettes to kids.  The guy went in, gutted companies, fired all their workers, cut the benefits of those who remained and left town.  If that’s the model that he wants to set up for our nation, that is a very frightening concept for me and the rest of America that somehow has managed to keep their jobs.  I don’t want a repeat of George W. Bush and I don’t think I should be branded as a “European style socialist” for not wanting to return to a time when we invaded countries for no reason, cut taxes for the wealthy for no reason, and had the largest foreign attack on American soil in our nations’ history.

“Don’t settle for something less than what you believe is the best and sometimes the best isn’t that great but it’s the best.”  That is a Rocky like speech that will survive far longer than his Presidential campaign or even Presidential aspirations.

It looks like Rick Santorum rented a movie theater for his victory celebration showing just how improbable and perhaps more importantly, how unsustainable his rise is.  It is extremely difficult for me to get my head around Rick Santorum as a serious candidate even with a win in Iowa tonight.  What does he do going forward?  Gingrich has a huge lead in southern states that he would need to win in order to have any chance at the nomination.  If you are a Republican you’ve got two choices: go with Romney or go with an alternative, but you better decide who that alternative is quickly because the only person who benefits from this amount of indecision is Mitt Romney.

Ron Paul is a candidate who appeals to young idealists, not credible nationwide, did terribly with older voters tonight.  It’s difficult for me to understand why anyone is even talking about the “ramifications of a Ron Paul win.”  There are no ramifications, he would go back to be as insignificant as ever and Republicans would continue to ignore him.  Right or wrong, that is what will happen.

The Republican party seems to be in a bit of the “November doesn’t count” mode where the nomination becomes this almost intramural fight about the substance of substance.

Quote of the night: “Republicans are against affirmative action in all cases except for picking their political nominees.” – J.C. Watts, Fmr. Republican Congressman.  That’s the only way I can explain how Mitt Romney might wind up being the nominee despite only getting around 30% of the overall Republican vote.

Ouch!  Mitt Romney is likely to get fewer votes this year than he got in 2008.  Romney’s support came from the Mississippi river basin and surrounding counties, none of which is a real surprise, but he did make some inroads in the middle of the state which would be good news if the Iowa Caucus were being held a month from now.

Some media outlets are being nice to Jon Huntsman and giving him 1% of the vote, TPM is not one of them listing him (correctly) at just .6%.

The person with the most to lose/gain in the Iowa Caucus is Newt Gingrich.  He has plummeted in national polling over the last couple of weeks and he needs a top tier finish to remain a viable alternative to Mitt Romney.  But where does Gingrich get his support if Rick Santorum finishes strong in Iowa?  Does he get it from the exit of another candidate, undecideds, or does he get it because Santorum can’t capitalize on a big finish in Iowa?  It’s probably going to be a combination of factors for Gingrich is if he’s able to retool his campaign going into New Hampshire.

If he can survive until South Carolina, this thing gets interesting in Florida and beyond.  It’s difficult to see how Mitt Romney benefits from a long, drawn out campaign.  He has not benefited from the prolonged exposure of a drawn out primary fight.  The numbers don’t back him up on this and it’s not that he can’t benefit, it’s that he simply doesn’t have the kind of campaign that knows how to capitalize on the advantages that having open competition gives you.  Rather than adapt to their environment, the Romney folks are more or less content to run out the clock.  This will probably work in winning the nomination.  I have no reason to believe he won’t be the nominee, but his people need to start thinking in terms of damage control because that is where their campaign is weakest.

There’s been a small issue brewing lately over why Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns.  It’s still not entirely apparent as to why he wouldn’t release his tax returns, it’s a fairly commonplace thing for a candidate running for office to do and usually it’s just a formality, a one-day story, but because of his incredible lack of judgment, this is going to be a drawn out story whenever he is forced to release them.  What’s even worse for the Romney camp is that if the Obama campaign is smart and I have every reason to believe that they are (or at least not completely incompetent) they will put the pressure on Romney’s campaign to release his tax returns and if he refuses will create a conspiracy theory approach as to why he refuses.  The reason for this is simple: it’s something that everyone does and by his not wanting to do it he shows a very basic ineptitude that will undoubtedly foreshadow many of his decisions should he become President of the United States.  In short, Romney needs to release his tax returns because he’s running for President, not Student Council.

Whatever Mr. Romney believes he’s hiding, unless he’s been cheating on his wife, it’s not worth it.  Even Newt Gingrich released his tax returns and though they were incredibly bad and made him look laughable as a candidate, he is still a contender for the nomination.  Now imagine that because of heat generated by President Obama’s campaign the Republican candidate for President has to reveal his tax returns.  This stuff is simple.  There’s no reason for this to even be an issue.  But like the payroll tax cut debate a couple of weeks ago, Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot whenever they get the opportunity, which is surprising because they are supposed to be the disciplined party, the party that doesn’t make these kinds of basic political mistakes.  Now because of basic ineptitude, Republican voters have something extra to scrutinize the Romney campaign about.  It’s just stupid and silly, yet now it’s a really big issue.  And it’s an issue that they will lose on even if there’s nothing there, in fact, especially if there’s nothing there because normal people don’t fail to disclose information that won’t get them in trouble.

Now this is the kind of thing that’s not going to hurt Romney in Iowa.  Those who support him there, support him in spite of their misgivings whereas those who oppose him support others because of them.  Every little mis-step his campaign makes further tarnishes him as a candidate.  The disadvantage of running a prolonged primary campaign is that unless you know how you’re going to turn your negatives into positives then your negatives stay negatives and just get amplified as the campaign goes on.  None of this bodes well for Team Romney and imagine what happens if he loses in Iowa or doesn’t win by 25+ points in New Hampshire.  Then all hell breaks loose.  Then the anti-Romney’s gain momentum and actually have the chance to create more disorder in the Republican primary.  Everything that Mitt Romney wants to do depends on meeting expectations.  As soon as there is a let-down, he finds himself being scrutinized.  That’s an extremely difficult way to run a campaign when your opponents aren’t falling by the wayside and in case the Romney people have forgotten already, the Obama campaign will not implode.  It’s been churning strong since 2003.  Romney needs to finish and finish quickly so that he can avoid scrutiny and prepare for the matchup he claims he’s been waiting for; the matchup with the President of the United States.  But, the only way that comes about is by running a flawless campaign.  From that vantage point, it almost seems better to be anybody but Romney at this point.

In Iowa though, it doesn’t seem this way because everything exists within an extremely conservative bubble.  This is a world where people actually think that the President was raised somewhere other than the United States, that is, people who aren’t all that rational.  Normally this kind of race would benefit an incumbent because of the massive amount of misinformation being flung around.  But these aren’t normal times.  True, the President will be boosted by an improving economy, but he’ll also be hurt by an increasingly polarized electorate.  If the election is about an improving an economy the President would win.  If this election is about the ability to lie, cheat and steal, Republicans win in a landslide.  They can do those three things better than anyone on the face of the Earth.  Need evidence?  Look at Newt Gingrich.

For my projections, I’m going to stick with the Des Moines Register’s numbers:

The million dollar question is of course: who benefits from the massive indecision?  Conventional wisdom would lead one to think that it would help the surging candidate, but that would be Rick Santorum.  Yeah, the guy who lost his last statewide election by sixteen points.  Sixteen points.  Yet, people are still bullish on his chances.

If this last graph tells us anything, it should be that Republicans have no idea who they like.  But there are other numbers that should be considered, like intensity.  That inevitably makes one wonder because even if Santorum can win the question thus becomes: can he sustain that momentum to other victories?  The obvious answer is “no,” so it becomes obvious that so long as Romney finishes in the top tier in the Caucus, he emerges the clear and unquestioned winner.

Now, look at the single day surges.  Romney is clearly the one with the momentum here.  Ron Paul’s numbers have been diminishing, but I still think he’s going to be the one that comes out as the winner because of his incredible ground game and his strong base of supporters that are as passionate for their candidate as should be humanly possible and in the end, I think that’s what will propel him to victory, as it typically does in a caucus atmosphere.  If it were a primary in Iowa, Romney would win, but because it’s a caucus and because Ron Paul understands this, Ron Paul will be the one that wins the Iowa Caucus.

If you believe the polls (which I don’t, but for the sake of argument will present nonetheless), then Mitt Romney is your front-runner in Iowa, Ron Paul is in second, and Rick Santorum is in the surging third position.  The reason that I think the polls for the Iowa caucus this year are ridiculous have been pretty well documented.  Check out the RCP average here, The NBC/Marist poll here, TPM average here, and Gallup daily here.  If I had to pick the order in Iowa it would look like this: Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman, Jon Huntsman.  I think Paul, Romney, and Perry will all be within the margin of error of one another.  Santorum and Gingrich will be close, Bachman will be in the low single digits, Huntsman will be lucky to get a full percentage point.  Until we see the Des Moines Register numbers tomorrow, which almost always predict the outcome, it’s going to be a bit of a crap shoot trying to pick the winner or even the win, place, show in Iowa.  Caucuses are different than primaries, thus their results are more difficult to predict.

Overall however, if you had asked anyone in the media just a couple of months ago, what Mitt Romney needed to do to sew up the nomination they’d have told you: win Iowa.  Today many are saying that the story would be the placement of the candidates relative to expectations.  That’s a dumb assessment.  It really is.  If Mitt Romney wins the Iowa Caucuses that means that he out-performed in a place no one thought he could out-perform in.  It’ll mean that he won a state that is reliably conservative and is a good predictor of the nominee going forward.  It means, in short, that Mitt Romney wins the nomination quickly by winning Iowa.  The reason no reliable media outlet is willing to say as much is as big of a story if not bigger than the actual outcome of the Iowa Caucuses.  I call it the 2000 syndrome.  Since the election night debacle of 2000, networks have been terrified of predicting the outcome of an election when there is even a shadow of a doubt as to who is going to win.

You’ve got to ask yourself some simple questions coming out of Iowa: who has the money to win the nomination after Iowa?  Romney.  Who has the organization to win the nomination after Iowa?  Romney.  Who has a national staff in place that can capitalize on a potential win in Iowa?  Romney.  This isn’t difficult people.  If Romney wins Iowa he gets the nomination.  The idea that if Santorum places in Iowa he’ll somehow get a jump somewhere else is so patently absurd that I’ve attempted to debunk it in almost every manner I can think of.  He doesn’t have the money, he doesn’t have the people, did I mention he doesn’t have the money or the organization?  One candidate was able to turn an Iowa upset into a nomination upset and his name was Barack Obama.  He won the nomination because he was incredibly well organized, well-funded, and had amazing charisma.  In case you haven’t noticed, no one in the Republican field is anything like Barack Obama.  Therefore, you will not see history repeating.  You especially won’t see such an anomaly in the Republican party.

Look at the Gallup national numbers:

The big black line going down is Newt Gingrich, the big green line going up is Mitt Romney.  Momentum swings elections more than anything else and right now, Mitt Romney has the momentum.  When you look at the other trends in the national polling data, two other things stick out.  Mitt Romney does well with Independents and Liberals.

That bodes well for Mitt Romney.  Mitt Romney is the only candidate in the field that gets double digits in every demographic group.

That bodes extremely well for Mitt Romney.  Now, you’ve also got to keep in mind that Ron Paul’s supporters are pretty much non-existent in other areas of the country and his momentum is on the down-swing since his racist newsletter came into the spotlight.  Do I need to tell you who that bodes well for?  At this point, I certainly hope not.

Now Mitt Romney might not be the guy that conservatives want to nominate, but he’s the guy they have to nominate.  They have to nominate him because he’s the guy that’s got the organization, the money, the key supporters, the endorsements, the energy, and the staying power to be on the stage for more than a couple of weeks.  We know this because he’s been a candidate for over four years.  Now, when you turn on the news and they tell you that Santorum is going to take New Hampshire by storm or that Newt Gingrich stands a chance in any state except South Carolina, then you should know that you’re listening to the 2000 syndrome manifest itself in some really ridiculous ways.  Rick Santorum will not be the nominee for the same reason that Newt Gingrich will not be the nominee and he will not be the nominee for the same reason Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Michelle Bachman will not be the nominee.  They’re all way too scary.  Romney is about as steady as she goes.  In fact, Romney is about as steady as any computer can go that is keeping up with Mitt Romney.

The takeaway from the Iowa caucuses is going to be this: Mitt Romney is a strong candidate because he plays well with traditional Republican voters and attracts key independent voters.  Remember that many states have an open primary system which means that even registered Democrats can vote in some Republican primaries.  That is only significant if people show up to support Romney or Dems get involved just to screw with the Romney campaign.  I live in Wisconsin where we have an open primary system.  I’ll be voting in the Republican primary because there is no Democratic primary.  I’ll be voting for anyone but Mitt Romney just to screw with the Romney folks and there are lots of “like-minded liberals” as the Ann Coulters of the world like to call us out there.  We don’t like Romney, but we really don’t like Republicans and we’re pissed at Republicans.  We’re pissed to the point that we will show up and vote for somebody we don’t believe in just to screw with the other party and that my friends, is the only way anyone comes even close to beating Mitt Romney.

Yesterday, I thought it was a bit odd that Politico posted a piece on their homepage titled: “Rick Santorum loves vests and turtlenecks.”  You’d think a serious journalistic website would have some heavier material on a candidate that’s polling in the top three in the Iowa Caucus, but my gripe isn’t with Politico, it’s with Republican voters.

Santorum has actually looked pretty good in his last couple debate performances.  He’s rebounded nicely since being completely freaked out by being asked a question at a debate by an openly gay Army Serviceman.  Rick Santorum was very solid today in his understanding of the hatred within the conservative community for the LGBT community.  He summed up his stance on marriage as “being between a man and a woman.”  Thankfully, he’s cleared that one up for us, I was confused earlier.  Now I know I can’t marry my dogs off to my cats or any other tomfoolery like that.

His awkwardly ’90′s mainstream Republican social policies aside, Santorum actually has some solid conservative bonafides.  He was a big backer of a lot of what the Bush administration did.  He backed their foreign policy, their tax cuts, their expansion of Medicare Advantage, in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a policy matter in which Rick Santorum and Goerge W. Bush disagreed.  And that’s precisely why Rick Santorum is not a credible candidate.  He’s not a credible candidate now and he never has been.  I joked earlier this month that with Gingrich surging, Santorum should get ready for the inevitable wave of support that would come with Gingrich’s descent.  Imagine how surprised I was when I found out he actually took my advice.

2006 was a banner year for Democrats.  We took back the House of Representatives and the United States Senate.  We also beat Rick Santorum by sixteen points.  Sixteen points. In his home state of Pennsylvania, where he stood for re-election, he lost by sixteen points.  That’s a tough thing to rebound from.  At least one would think that would be a tough thing to rebound from.  But when you look at the George W. Bush agenda and you look at today’s Republican party, you’d be hard pressed to see a distinction.  In fact, the only thing that conservatives seem upset about right now is that the same people who were a part of the Bush 43 administration are not being given senior campaign roles in the campaigns going on today.  They needn’t worry.  Whoever is the nominee will need the help of establishment Republicans.

Rick Santorum is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party any more than Newt Gingrich could be the nominee or Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman etc.  Your money has to be on Romney at this point.  He’s a machine.  He’s still in Iowa chugging it out.  His PACs have been buying up every ounce of Iowa airtime they could get their hands on and they’ll do the same thing through Super Tuesday.  The only question now is: will he win it cleanly?  There are still major obstacles to Romney’s nomination.  The conservative base still does not like this guy.  They don’t have the hard-on for him like they had a hard-on for Bush, but that could change with a brokered convention.  Brokered conventions are nasty business.  That’s why no one has them anymore.  But that may be what it takes to clear Romney with the conservative base.  One thing must be made crystal clear to the Republicans however: Mitt Romney is your inevitable nominee whether you like it or not.

But, don’t take my word for it.  Romney will win because he’s got money and since 1994, the candidate who outspends their opponent wins 94% of the time.  That includes all national races.  94%.  Write it down.  When the only poll that matters in Iowa comes out on Saturday night, the Des Moines Register poll will have Romney up by about five points, Ron Paul trailing by a couple of points, probably within the margin of error and Rick Santorum will probably be at about 15%, Perry behind him slightly, Gingrich behind him, then Bachman so on and so forth.  If anyone has an opportunity to upset in Iowa it’s Rick Perry.  The guy has solid conservative credentials and people like him even if he is just another Texas idiot.  Conservatives like Texas nutjobs and that isn’t likely to change overnight.  I would not be surprised if Perry finished second or third in the Iowa Caucus, I really wouldn’t.  His grassroots support is strong and Ron Paul is wavering in the wake of those awful newsletters that he printed back in 1995.

I have no idea why those newsletters didn’t become an issue sooner than now because you’d have thought that they would have been an issue the last time around (2008) but they weren’t.  Instead, Paul was given a free pass and many who didn’t do their opposition research properly were given a free pass and that’s too bad because Paul has been allowed to masquerade as a serious candidate for some time now and that really shouldn’t be the case.  One thing we should all take away from this year is that when someone tells you a demonstrably horrific tale that sounds too terrible to be true, it’s best to investigate.

No one wanted to believe what Sandusky did at Penn State and much in the same vein, many do not want to believe that Ron Paul could have said such awful things about African-Americans at any point in his career, but that does not absolve them of guilt.  If Ron Paul were a serious candidate for the Presidency he’d own this and tell us why this was allowed to happen, instead he’s running for the hills because he simply isn’t man enough to own a policy on anything.  He wants to run out of the Middle East with no exit strategy and he wants to run away from his own past with no exit strategy.  Ron Paul is the biggest of the pretenders in the Republican primary.  Santorum got a surge, Paul has real support, which means that there are real people out there that he has let down and at some point, he’s got to be answerable for that.

Pitch Session:

When you’re in Hollywood, whether you’re a writer, director, actor, or producer, you’ve always got to pitch stuff.  Whether it’s the new project you’re working on, a project you’re trying to secure funding for, or just an idea you’d like someone in a position of power to think about, you’ve got to pitch the concept and develop the product.  This year, probably more than any year I can remember, we’ve suffered from bad pitch session ideas.  Most pitch sessions involve the comparison of film genre successes like let’s say you’re trying to make a romantic comedy, so Two Weeks Notice meets Bridget Jones’s Diary.  That would be the pitch, but the only way you’re movie gets green-lighted is if it has a “twist.”  Thus every pitch session you’ll ever partake in will involve a “twist.”  So with the romantic comedy, Two Weeks Notice meets Bridget Jones’s Diary, with a twist; the man is the protagonist not a woman.  These are the kinds of ideas that go into pitch sessions and leave as actual movie plot lines.  I’ll take you through the thinking of some of these terrible decisions.

Larry Crowne: Sleepless in Seattle meets Pretty Woman with a twist.  Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are twenty million dollar earners per film, why not put them together with an adorable scooter and a makeshift plot?  Throw in some recycled lines, etc and you’re good to go.  Plus, look how manly Tom Hanks looks on that scooter.

Cowboys & Aliens:  Die Another Day meets Alien and Indiana Jones with a twist.  James Bond and Indiana Jones travel back to the old west and fight something that the two characters don’t have in common: aliens.  People love cowboy movies and they love alien movies, why not put them together?  I can see the one sheet now…

We Bought a Zoo:  Jerry Maguire meets Elizabethtown with a twist.  Lovable Matt Damon character loses wife and is forced to rebuild the life he had and in so doing realizes that the past cannot be forgotten.  The journey is marked by the growth of his children and the growth of animals because Matt Damon decided to fix up a zoo as an analogy for the rebuilding that needs to take place in his life.  That’s deep man, real deep.

The Hangover Pt. II:  The Hangover meets Hot Tub Time Machine with a twist.  Rather than starting from where we left off, what if we just re-do everything we did the first time around, but this time let’s make it more obvious, more repugnant, and more annoying.  We can literally start the movie with the line: “it happened again.”

Friends with Benefits:  The Social Network meets 27 Dresses with a twist.  A guy and a girl are friends, but one wants to be more than friends, so they decide to start sleeping with each other (because that always ends well.)  In the process of making incredibly poor decisions, the two characters realize that there is more to love than sex.  Get a strong male figure and an attractive woman as your leads and this becomes “high concept” material.

Final Destination 5:  Final Destination meets Final Destination 2, 3, and 4, with a twist.  The issue we’ve always had with this franchise is that we can’t put together ideas with actors, directors, and screenplays fast enough!  So let’s use the exact same formula as we have in the past, but this time let’s make it slower and gorrier than the past couple we made.

Midnight in Paris:  The Purple Rose of Cairo meets Annie Hall with a twist.  Woody Allen is played by someone not named Woody Allen and goes back to the time that Woody Allen would have loved to live in.  Everything about the Woody Allen character is the same as the actual Woody Allen, but in an equally annoying actor, someone like Owen Wilson, for example.  After that, we can have Woody Allen, I mean Owen Wilson have partake in all sorts of neurotic behavior and make it a big joke about the past being no different than the present in the form of jokes that are outside our target-demos and over the heads of most of the people who will see our film.

Our Idiot Brother:  The Love Guru meets any Paul Rudd movie you’ve ever seen with a twist.  Seriously, this one will be a hit!  All we need to do is make Paul Rudd as annoying as possible and the other characters as asymmetrical as possible.  Throw in some people who audiences like and you don’t need to worry about bothersome things like story or protagonists.

The Debt:  Munich meets Payback with a twist.  Everyone and their mother loves Helen Mirren and since everyone loved “Red” we can just recycle that idea and make it a little more violent and everyone would be better off if we just excluded any Eric Bana scenes as well.

Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon: Transformers meets Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with a twist.  Let’s not re-cast and re-ignite interest in the feud between Director Michael Bay and Actress Megan Fox.  Media attention is the absolute last thing you want if you’re making a movie.  No, instead let’s take a Victoria’s Secret model and cast her in the Megan Fox role, make the characters as dull as possible and put in place a story line that not only is implausible, but laughable upon viewing the synopsis on RottenTomatoes.

The Iron Lady: Lions for Lambs meets State of Play with a twist.  Rather than relying on action or interesting story for our plot development, let’s make it all about Meryl Streep and how she can do anything, even if it’s so incredibly cliche that the very mention of her name in connection with a biopic of Margaret Thatcher is cringe-worthy.

Horrible Bosses:  Office Space meets The Hangover with a twist.  Rather than having any of the plausible office space humor let’s replace it with dirty, over the top gags and Jennifer Aniston playing an unlikable character.  Throw in Jason Sudekis, that guy from Arrested Development and that guy from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and you’ve got a deal!

Contagion:  Outbreak meets Children of Men with a twist.  Put together an all star cast, a standard doomsday scenario and you’re in business.  The one problem with disaster films and this has been true for quite some time is that it’s very difficult to get an audience actively engaged in the outcome of either the film or the characters in the film.  How this did with its’ test demo would be interesting information because I don’t see where this film takes off.

Margin Call:  Too Big to Fail meets Inside Job meets Wall Street with a twist.  The twist is that we’re supposed to feel something for the people and in some ways understand that in the end, it’s always about the money.  The problem with this film was that Kevin Spacey’s reservations weren’t philosophic and the main characters were far too flawed to be likable in any circumstance, let alone those surrounding a faltering wall street investing firm.  Best film about the financial industry?  Hardly.

X Men: First Class:  X Men meets X2 meets X-men: the Last Stand meets Wolverine meets every other franchise reboot with a twist.  Lets put together some stock ideas, stock jokes, nerdy characters and an even dorkier plot and see what happens.  Bad dialogue, impossible stunts, and terrible acting is what ensues and it is anything but entertainment.  I cringed all the way through January Jones’s awful performance and I wouldn’t mind never seeing her in another feature film again.

Drive:  Driver meets Knight Rider meets The Transporter meets Bullitt with a twist.  The twist of course being that Ryan Gosling is no Ryan O’Neil and neither does it matter.  The first half is so touching and strong, while the second half is so brutal and mean that what we wind up with in the end is a melancholy product that we’re not entirely sure if we liked or not, but one thing is for sure, it had some entertaining and oftentimes disturbing moments.

Bridesmaids:  The Wedding Singer meets But I’m a Cheerleader with a twist.  The only thing original about this movie was that it wanted to be more than it ever had an opportunity to be.  Unfortunately for the film and the vehicle that it was supposed to be for Kristen Wiig, it lacked the comedic depth of a film like Crazy, Stupid, Love or the performances that make romantic comedies well, romantic.  And isn’t Don Draper always that big of a prick?

A few days ago, I wrote about the utter hopelessness of the Republican position on the payroll tax holiday and today I suppose I ought to be jumping up and down in utter jubilation with the rest of my Democratic colleagues.  But, I’m not.  It’s not that we didn’t take down the other side, we did.  It’s not that this wasn’t really good politics for us, it was.  It’s not that we didn’t do something good for the American people, we did.  I’m not ready to jump up and down and proclaim victory because we didn’t win anything.  We fought for the status quo and the status quo is what we got.  That’s not a victory, that’s just staving off defeat.

Listening to the Tea Party Republicans, a caucus that apparently no one wants to be a part of any longer, you’d think that the President was wrong, but he wasn’t.  In fact, the messaging sounds so directly disingenuous that it’s frustrating.  But, that’s the point.  Tea Partiers want us to get upset about stupid things, so they make a big deal out of the fact that the payroll tax holiday will only last for two months instead of 12.  They make it sound like the President wasn’t for a 12 month extension, but rather forced this outcome upon them.  Both sides wanted a 12 month extension, they just disagreed on how to pay for it.  Democrats wanted a revenue raiser on millionaires, Republicans wanted cuts to essential services.  That’s a disagreement in philosophy not a disagreement on policy.

The Republicans are trying to frame their terrible politics on good policy, but they’re not fighting for good policy, in fact, they’re not even fighting for policy period.  They’re fighting not only because they like to fight and they enjoy fighting, but because that’s all they really know how to do.  Tell them they’re right and they’ll ask you how?  Explain to them how superior they are to you and they’ll ask you why you’ve only realized that now.  Tell them how brilliant they are and they’ll ask you to explain the many ways in which their brilliance has enhanced your life as if their intelligence could have manifested itself in no other way.  There is no winning with a crowd that doesn’t want to merely win, but shove your face in it.  They want to win, they want to win dirty and they want to win by setting the world on fire because it’ll make the most noise.

Their fight is something that can’t be played out in a media cycle, it can’t be played out in just one election, this is a fight that they want to have until the end of time because they honestly believe that above all else, they’re better than you and even when you give in and allow them the satisfaction of believing that they’re right and you’re wrong; that’s just not good enough.  They want to see you wallow in your defeat and they’re not content to watch it, they want to participate in your demise.  Victory for these people is unattainable, not because of the standards set up by you or me, but because they want what they’ll never be able to have and they just can’t bear to admit that to themselves or to acknowledge the fact that the truly sad part of life is that you spend the majority of your time working for something you can’t have and trying to get something that simply can’t be attained.  Admitting failure isn’t always a sign of defeat, sometimes it’s a sign of sanity and for Republicans, sanity doesn’t exist anymore.

The big issue that I have with this whole payroll tax debate is that Republicans are not being honest with anyone, including themselves.  This debate is not about the payroll tax cut, everyone wants the payroll tax cut to be extended.

Republicans are upset that they aren’t getting more in return for their support for something that they don’t view as “their fight.”  Republicans viewed the debt ceiling debate as an issue that could divide the electorate against the President and they were correct in that assessment.  The problem was and is that the electorate is equally divided with regards to who bears the blame for forcing that issue.  Democrats actually lead Republicans in the Generic Congressional ballot, suggesting that Republicans aren’t winning the message war on the debt and deficits front and that Democrats aren’t winning as handily as they should be on jobs.

Democrats are making jobs their issue and the problem for Republicans is that they are concerned about their pet projects passing the house instead of meeting the Democrats on jobs and beating them in the messaging war there.  It would make sense to get into a fight about the single most important issue of our time, it makes absolutely no sense to get into a hypothetical fight that we all know is a loser just to prove that you have the big set of balls that everyone admits you have.  This is a dead argument and what’s frustrating to Republicans in this instance is the same thing that’s frustrating to Democrats and that is that Republican intransigence is even more annoying when you make issues out of things that don’t need to be issues and right now, the payroll tax cut doesn’t need to be an issue.  After all, we all agree that it ought to be extended.  Republicans are playing the outrage game and the really sad part about it is that they’re losing at their own game.

The Republican leadership in the House is trying to get everyone worked into a tizzy over the fact that the payroll tax extension is only for two months instead of for a full year.  The reason that the payroll tax holiday extension is only two months as opposed to a year is because Republicans refused to agree to an extension for a year, yet they’re trying to blame Democrats for it when Democrats weren’t even involved in the problem to begin with.  You can only point your finger at someone who is in the room.  When you attempt to deflect blame by pointing to someone who had nothing to do with what you’re talking about, you look like the idiot that you are trying to act like you’re not and that not only makes you look like a bigger idiot, it makes you look like an idiot who is looking for a fight and no one wants to be around an idiot, let alone someone who is also actively looking for a fight.