01 Jan 2012

Iowa Caucuses: Who Cares?

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The Iowa caucuses are caucuses, not even a primary. They have a lousy record of predicting the eventual nominee, but their significance in the eyes of the media grows larger and larger and larger in the absence of any meaningful reportable activity in the presidential nomination contest.

Fred Cagle argues that we are all wasting our time by paying so much attention to Iowa. Iowa is like those NFL pre-season games: the teams don’t always have their acts together or even care all that much. The real contest season that counts starts later.

I’ve always considered the Iowa caucus a speed bump on the road to picking a president—the place where televangelist Pat Robertson beat George H.W. Bush, and it was won last time by President Mike Huckabee. My suspicions were confirmed when I went out there in 2008 to follow a group of Tennessee legislators campaigning for Fred Thompson.

Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia went to Iowa and spent time there in 1976 and when he won the caucus he was an overnight sensation. In addition to all his other sins, Carter injected an anonymous collection of house parties out on the prairie into the national conversation. Political reporters discovered they could start the coverage of the presidential campaign early and they learned to love Des Moines. Hey, it was the heartland.

The caucus season begins with presidential candidates slavishly kissing the ring of Archer Daniels Midland and ethanol subsidies. Then the candidates buy voters tickets and feed them to get them to a barbecue/straw poll and the press treats it like it means something. …

Will winning Iowa give someone momentum into the primaries? John McCain finished fourth in Iowa, and then won South Carolina.

New Hampshire takes pride in picking its own winner, rarely paying much attention to the farmers out on the prairie.

My point in all this is that the Iowa caucus has very little to do with who becomes president. It is a prelude to the real campaign and it entertains the press and political junkies. It is a place for candidates to practice a stump speech.

The results this time will not tell us anything about who will win the nomination, but we’ll have wall to wall coverage anyway. I don’t see any way we will ever relegate Iowa to the position it deserves.

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boligat

“Iowa caucuses are caucuses, not even a primary.” True, but they also don’t cost the taxpayer any money. If the parties want primaries, they should pay for them. If they don’t want to pay for them, then every voter should be able to vote for candidates from every party represented on the ballot, and every party should have a line for a write in for every office.



bob sykes

Huntsman got it right: “Iowa picks corn. NH picks presidents.”

They also got their heads handed to them by Rutgers.



susan maureen brandt

(please let this comment stay on your site, as it has been written to help stop the terrible crime of baby-switching. This is not a joke, hundreds of people have been killed in the past few years to hide this, and even though it sounds unbelievable, it can be easily proven through even a half an hour of research. Thank you so much for helping if you can. Sincerely, Susan Maureen Brandt.)

Sports Bloodline Shocks Matt Damon Fans

Actor and father Matt Damon is at the heart of a shocking scandal involving athletes and celebrity breeding.

Unheard of by the general public, sports teams are organized around breeding circles, meant to heighten the athletic skills of those involved over several generations.

But there have been many examples of cross-over between the athletic and entertainment worlds over the past hundred years, as entertainers have been bred to be more athletic than their ancestors in Vaudeville, British Music Hall, and other past genres of staged performers.

Similarly, athletes have been bred to have the facial attractiveness and charisma of performers, resulting in related celebrities such as actor Paul Newman and hockey play Wayne Gretzky, who was secretly the child of Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward. Woodward and Newman were in turn both secret offspring of a Czech hockey star.

Now actor Matt Damon has been revealed as part of a breeding circle involving hockey legends Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito. Damon was the result of a pregnancy between Orr and his future wife Peggy, and the resemblance is clear. If this were an isolated case of a young couple having pre-marital sex at a time when it was disallowed by society, and giving the child up for adoption through normal channels, there would be no scandal.

However, Damon was then set up to meet his half-sister, Luciana Barroso, when she was working as a bartender at a bar that Damon just happened to visit with fellow cast and crew while filming a movie in Florida. Barroso is the child, produced several years later, of Orr’s teammate Esposito and Orr’s wife, whom he was still married to. This could also be an isolated case of marital infidelity, but the chances of Damon and Barroso meeting as adults, especially when Barroso was raised in South America, are slim to none.

And, in fact, this type of breeding scenario is played out every day in an unfathomable number of otherwise normal American homes. The key to untangling the secrets is to learn the codes used to help talent scouts, producers, team owners and managers and even coaches figure out who is whose kid. The name ORR appears written backwards in Barroso, along with the initial B, for Bobby. Her full name, Luciana Bozan Barroso, is referring to Esposito’s cultural heritage, the town of Boston, and Bobby Orr. Orr’s wife is assumed to be his half-sister as well.

But don’t look to Matt Damon’s current flock of children for heightened athletic ability. There is little chance that the children he is currently raising are biologically the children and Damon and his wife. Their natural infants were either taken at birth, or Barroso was impregnated with embryo produced by other, similar-looking athletes or celebrities.

Other examples of celebrity baby-switching are:

Russian hockey star Pavel Bure is the child of Bobby Orr and a daughter of Phil Esposito.

John Travolta’s real parents were actors performing in Australia. However, these two performers were secretly father and daughter, and were both therefore descended from the same great-grandparent, the King of England. This is why Travolta’s secret children with two of his co-stars from his most famous roles were raised as future royalty, Peter Phillips and his wife, and half-sister, Autumn Kelly.

George Clooney is an example of a secret celebrity baby being raised by another secret celebrity baby he is related to but not in the way publicly stated. His father is a secret son of actor Tyrone Power, and Tyrone Power also had a son who was raised as Dick Van Dyke, whose looks took more after his mother, a rather horse-faced actress. Van Dyke then had a secret child with actress Ann-Margret, resulting in Clooney. He was switched with the natural infant of Clooney’s father and mother, and thus there is a family resemblance between father and son, tracing back to Tyrone Power, and yet the pair are actually uncle and nephew.

Clooney has already acted with his own children, though he claims to have none. An early role resulted in the actress he co-starred with in up in the air, and the reason for her unusual looks is, again, incest. Her mother was the daughter of Power’s own daughter, and breeding partner, Gene Tierney.

Lana Del Rey seemed to pop out of nowhere, but fans discovered her earlier attempts at a singing career under her birth name, Lizzie Grant. Upset to realize she was the result of a marketing campaign, plastic surgery, and a glamorous name change, it has not yet been made public why such effort was put into a second attempt at Grant’s singing career. Her biological parents, possibly only through in vitro laboratory work, were George Burns and Ann-Margret, to commemorate Ann-Margret’s performance at a tribute to Burns the year Grant was born, making Lana Del Rey the half-sister to George Clooney.



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