It is common to hear rhetoric in church about “the world”.  It’s usually about how the “world is going downhill”, which is often followed up with stories about the erosion of morality as a sad sign of growing godlessness among the nation/world at large.  I don’t fault my fellow churchgoers for going down this rhetorical path.  It’s a well beaten one and trodden often by church leadership as well.  (So goes the Mormon echo chamber.)

I think it’s true that some very ugly behaviors, previously accepted as wrong by society, have become more acceptable over time.  So – it’s not an error of fact to say the “world” at large is headed in a more morally relativistic, morally lackadaisical direction.

However, I started to be bothered by this “world going to hell in a handbasket” ideology because I felt it had reach a sad level of cliché.  It seems like, more and more, it becomes the launching point into which we delve into any topic.

“This world is so evil, let’s talk about being a good father.”

“Well, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so let’s talk about food storage.”

“The world is such a terrible place to live, let’s talk about the NFL draft and just say we had a lesson.”

No – there’s more to this “world is a terrible place” stuff.  I mean, I live in the world for most of 7 days a week, and I have to say it’s not that terrible of a place – at least in my local sphere of interaction.  I see great people at work, great people at home, and great people at church who are – for the most part – trying to do what’s right for their careers, families, and themselves.  I doubt there are many who get up in the morning, put their pants on one leg at a time, and head out the door with a list of traditional moral codes to break that day.

So, dissecting this a little more I came to the conclusion that it’s no so much about the “world” as a whole.  After all, the world is just made up of a bunch of individuals, right?  So why are we – individually – making some common decisions that, when examined together, can be judged as “bad” for society at large?

After giving it some thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that this closely relates to another of my basic life philosophies – that we all do what we want.  As an extension of that thought, please consider the following:  If I want it, it can’t be wrong – or bad – because I want it, and I should have everything I want.  How can something I want be bad for me?  Because I want it, I should have it.

That, to me, is the driving force – the gasoline on the fire – behind the moral degradation we see in the world at large.  As individuals let slip their individual moral code, it breaks down the last barriers between the internal want for – whatever – and frees the individual to wholeheartedly seek that which they want.

Since I believe that there are moral rights and wrong (or more accurately, I think I believe in moral ‘betters’ and ‘worsers’), my conclusion is that the “world is going downhill” philosophy is an error of perspective, not an error of judgement.  If you, instead, consider the “because I want it, I should have it” mentality – it becomes much more self-indicting.  It puts the onus back on one’s self to reconsider their value judgments – and reconsider whether the pursuit of their wants is contributing to what is good and right in “the world” or to what is wrong with “the world.”  Asking this question invites a person to apply their own moral code to themselves rather than to the nameless, faceless “world” of others.

We can even extend it to explain human behavior outside of moral jugement.  This philosophy is even more evident in financial transactions.  We have become a society of greed (hello financial collapse of 2008!) and consumerism because of this same drive toward want.

In a smaller example, if I really want the iPad 3 to the point that I will stop at nothing to get it.  I may go to harmful lengths to get it.  To take it to the superlative, let’s say I sell a kidney to procure the funding to get it.  Now, there’s nothing morally wrong with selling a kidney (as far as the moral codes with which I am familiar), but I think we can all agree this would be a terrible decision.  But I want it that badly, and that’s the issue here.  The extent you will go to satisfy a want – can cause problems for both you and the ones you love.

Due to my calling as the “Stake Technology Specialist” – the job was mine to do the webcast.  But webcasting isn’t what this blog post is about.  For those who’ve been following Facebook (or me in real life), you’re probably sick of me talking about the webcasting thing.  Understandable.  No, this post is about a group of people I got to know while webcasting – and a gift they possess that I didn’t really understand until now; the Spanish language translators.  This group of people simul-translated the meeting, as it was occurring in English, into Spanish.

While people thought I was impressive for being able to technologically offer both languages, I was more impressed with their ability to actually do the translating.  Since I know Portuguese (and can understand a good deal of slowly-spoken, church-related Spanish) I spent a good portion of the meeting listening to the Spanish side of the webcast rather than the English side.  I was incredibly impressed with these people’s ability to do this great service for the Spanish-speaking people of our Stake.

As I was considering the incredible talent they must have to hear a new sentence in English at the same time the speak the last sentence in Spanish, I remembered a skill I learned in my band days called “circular breathing”.  Circular breathers are an impressive set of musicians who can sustain a note with the wind trapped in their mouth while they breathe through their nose and refill their lungs.  It’s a pretty special skill that is quite difficult to do with finesse.

Kenny-G holds the Guiness Book of World Recrods for the longest note ever held using circular breathing: 45 minutes, 47 seconds holding an E flat on a saxaphone

This was the exact skill these translators have.  They seem to be able to hear in one language, process it in their brain, and repeat it in Spanish – all in real time!  I can’t imagine how they do it, and with such incredible fidelity.  Even obscure poetry and cultural anachronisms they seemed to translate with ease.

I wish I knew their names or was able to take a picture of them in action (I was a little preoccupied with my own video production responsibilities), but I suppose – like most service in the church – they continue to be largely unnoticed, except in the recesses of my little blog.

Maybe it’s this string of southern primaries and caucuses? Or maybe it’s the fact that one only has to drive through the state of Kansas, observing the hyper religious pro-life signs all over the sides of the roads, to realize that, yes, there is a religious-right in the Republican party who really thinks Mitt’s religion is so untenable they’d vote for a washed up Senator who couldn’t post a win in his own district or a deluded old Speaker who seems to be marauding the countryside looking for a second shot in the post-neocon era, despite what any numbers seem to say.

And that same religious right would go so far as to make this election about social issues – when the winning strategy was clearly to make this about economics.

Look, I think Mitt is a clown in his own way as well, but much less of a clown than those two. I even consider Ron Paul less of a clown than Santorum and Gingrich.

But here’s my real question when it comes to this whole process: When is the Republican party going to stop shooting itself in the foot and start making President Obama run for reelection?  The longer this draws out, the more rope the challengers are giving the President to hang them with, and the more President Obama goes laughing to the bank.

It’s a well-known fact that independents and moderates in a few critical states (which BTW, Santorum is terribly weak in) are the only way to win in the fall.  The GOP needs to realize that they aren’t getting that vote with Santorum; the guy who has completely alienated that demographic AND the women voters as well.

Right now, I see very little chance for a GOP win in the fall.  People are talking about how the GOP convention will be a “reset” for the nominee, but I don’t think so.  I think in Romney you have a base that will be less motivated to turn out, and in Santorum or Gingrich you will have a critical group of voters completely turned off from them as a Presidential candidate.

…Just my humble opinion…

Since WEJr’s first birthday last week, it seems like our toy collection has rapidly expanded.  We got him toys, both sets of grandparents got him toys, and a couple of friends also contributed to the growing pile of stuff.  It’s quite cute, because he is now old enough to actually entertain himself with toys for a short period of time.  Mostly, he just carries them around, chews on them, or otherwise misuses or abuses them.  When he plays with them correctly (in the way they were designed), it’s completely by accident.  It’s so fun to watch him figure them out, and even have preferences for certain toys.  Before, it was always us trying to entertain him or distract him, but now it’s him doing it to himself.  Who knew he’d become a real-live person?!?!

With the newfound collection of toys, though, I’ve come to a new depth of understanding about the toy world.  Originally, I was holding the line at “no toys with batteries”, though I’ve now completely lost that fight.  I now understand there are really a lot of other types of toys parents should fear and dread just as equally as battery-powered toys:

Toys that have batteries:  The frustration here isn’t just that you have to replace the batteries, it’s that the time span where the batteries work and the child wants to play with the toy never totally coincide unless it’s the day the child receives the toy.  Beyond that the batteries are always dead at the worst time.  If you’re lucky, the toy will have some inherent value without the battery operated feature, but this is rarely the case.  Prepare for tears and sadness when the toy does not function.

Toys that are in pieces or sets:  With these toys, the minute the plastic wrap is removed, the toy falls apart into a million lose-able pieces.  The joy of toy is for the kid to put the toy together in various configurations, but the frustration of the toy is for the parent to keep those pieces out from under sofas, coffee tables, and in the same room.  Invariably, the parent ends up putting the puzzle together, putting the legos back in the bin, or putting all the other pieces away, just in time for the kid to come and dump them out all over again.

Toys that make noise:  These are the toys parents regret having the most.  Whenever the child figures out the noise-making capability, there will come a day when all you will hear – over and over – is that same noise.  You will hear it everywhere you go.  It will haunt you even when you are away from the toy and the child.  You will start to hear/speak in voices of the toys until, one day, you are driven so mad that you freak out and take a sledge hammer to the toy (my approach) or quietly throw the toy away (Aud’s approach).

Vintage toys:  Who doesn’t love the vintage, simple toys; blocks, trains, balls, bats, etc.  These are definitely my favorite toys because of their nostalgia and because of their hipness (I’m real hip).  WEJr is at the point, though, where his enjoyment of vintage toys is limited to chewing on them until the vintage, antiqued paint chips off into his mouth and teeth – which leads me to wonder if they were safely/non-toxically made…

As you can see, there is no perfect toy.  All toys are meant to make a parent’s life miserable.  But, they are extraordinarily necessary to keep your kid sufficiently distracted from your more expensive, adult toys that they seem to gravitate toward naturally.

Yes, I should be working right now.  It’s monday at 10am – my usual start time for the week – but after 3 days off of work with the world’s nastiest stomach flu/virus, I’m not particularly feeling excited about wading into the pile of email I’ve missed.  Instead, I will regale you with tales from this first episode of the entire family being really sick (with something really gross) all at the same time.

It all started on Monday night.  Eli really struggled to go to bed like he should.  The previous night, we had just discussed how we needed to hold our line on putting him in bed and letting him fall asleep, so as the ‘mean dad’ I got to be the one on Monday to go in every 2/3/5/10 minutes to calm him, wrap him up again, and lay him back down.  It’d been a strange evening anyway.  Eli fell asleep quickly after hitting his head earlier that night, so his sleep schedule was all off anyway.

He finally went back to sleep at midnight, and I went to bed.  Two hours later he started howling again, so I tapped Audrey – “your turn.”  She went in there and the next thing I know, she’s waking me up saying she thinks Eli has a concussion because he’s got a nosebleed, has soaked his entire bed with vomit, and won’t stop vomiting.

Having had a few concussions of her own, I trusted that Audrey knows what she’s talking about – and well, if a kid won’t stop vomiting, there must be something wrong, right?  So we jump in the car and head to the ER at 2am.  Thankfully, it was dead and we got right in.

Here’s where we probably went wrong – we fell right into a doctor’s biggest pet peeve: spending more time describing what we thought was wrong with our kid rather than just focusing on the symptoms and letting them make the diagnosis.  They ended up doing a CT scan to make sure his head was OK, even though they had pretty much ruled out a concussion in their minds (because he never passed out, he had no visible bruising or swelling, and his nosebleed ended up being a cut in his nose – not from the sinuses).  CT came back clear.  They gave him a little pill to help him with nausea and sent us all home at 5am.

We stayed home to recuperate on Tuesday from being up all night worrying, and to help Eli stabilize – still a bit nervous that we didn’t know quite what we were dealing with.

Wednesday we went back to work, but as soon as I got home, I was feeling nauseous.  A few hours later, I emptied what felt like the contents of my entire body into the toilet.  Audrey followed about 6 hours later.  Yuk.  Unless the concussion was contagious, it was clearly something else and something communicable.  Lovely.

We spent Thurs, Fri, Sat, and Sun convalescing, having no appetite and ingesting nothing but saltines and powerade. A little toast with apple butter helped break the monotony, but we tried not to be too adventurous.  We were able to hold things down, but Eli threw up 3 more times during the week, usually at night right before bed.  Saturday, he decided to throw up all over me 20 minutes before I was supposed to be at the church activity playing with the band for the Valentines Dance.  Yuk!

It’s strange being a parent and dealing with your own kid’s throw up, though.  You know its true love when you are actually relieved when your kid throws up on you rather than on the couch or carpet.  It’s a lot easier to put yourself in the shower.  I just need to find a better way of saying it than saying “KEEP THE THROW UP ON MOMMY, BIG BOY!”

It’s been a long time since I’ve been sick like this.  Usually, I’m more prone to colds and coughs rather than stomach problems, and it’s been a long time since I’ve not felt like I could eat for so many days in a row.  You sure do miss those small pleasures – eating whatever you want whenever you want it, and not fearing that it might just come right back out again.

On the upside, I did lose 7 lbs in 5 days, and I’m back on track for the weight loss goal that Audrey set for us back in November.  Woo hoo!  Now, I’m just one more stomach flu away from my ideal weight!

Professional opposition researchers and national news media have now had over 6 years to do serious opposition research and skeleton digging with Romney, but they have met their match.  Recent smear attempts show that the worse they could do was:

#1. Romney, as a volunteer ecclesiastical leader, once counseled a single-parent to give her child up for adoption.  The woman alleges that Mitt threatened her with Church disciplinary action, but Mitt has denied that allegation.  Keeping a child conceived out of wedlock is not grounds for church discipline in the LDS Church anyways, so clearly there is a disconnect in the story.  It’s possible that Mitt informed her that continued sexual promiscuity on her part would lead to church discipline, as adultery and fornication are not especially encouraged (but are grounds for a church disciplinary council).

At any rate, take a step back – he is being attacked for — wait for it — encouraging an adoption.  Whoa.  The horror!  Imagine that, an ecclesiastical leader trying to encourage people to raise their kids in homes with both mothers and fathers.

If you think about it, this isn’t even a smart attack for the left.  President Obama himself has campaigned on and been outspoken about the need for both mothers and fathers in the home, and the importance of having both parents engaged.  He himself is a model of this, insisting to his scheduling staff that he be with his young family for dinner every night possible, only allowing missing up to two dinners a week.

#2. Romney, as leader of Bain Capital, laid people off.  Now Romney says over and over that he actually hired more people and saved more jobs than he laid off, but what baffles me is that his fellow republicans – the type of folks known for doing practically anything to make a buck (inside and outside the law, regardless of ethics or morality) – would be pounding him on that.  I doubt that many republican business owners struggled to lay a few people off in the name of saving their own business or increasing their profitability.  You can’t be the part that touts free-enterprise and unregulated economies on one hand and then punish your own for adhering to those principles.

So… that’s it.  That’s all they could find.  No mistresses.  No love children.  Just those two things and an odd religion.

Compare that to the recent competition between Herman Cain and Dr. Ron Paul (the obstetrician) to see who had more exposure in their lifetime to female genitalia…  If your decision for a presidential candidate is based largely on character or morals — not only spoken of but also lived by — I think you might have your man.

It’s not that I haven’t had good ideas.  I thought about creating videos of footage of WEJr to go with each paragraph.  I thought of creating a really cool interactive post.  I thought about creating personalized posts – like christmas cards.  I had one or two good starts – but – nothing.  Nothing.  I couldn’t bring myself to finish anything.  My effort and stamina ran out before I could even start any of my brililant ideas.

So I’m going to try something a little odd.  I’m going to post an ornery New Year’s post.  I’m just going to lay it all out here, and I pledge one thing – I will post this blog, come hell or high water, whether I finish it or not.  Why?  Because I’m just going to focus on writing some raw emotion here.  Editing will be minimal.  Cutesiting up with pictures?  None.  Giving it thought?  Not a chance.  You’re just going to get the ornery white guy’s pontification on all his problems.

Lately, we’ve had a cough running through our house.  This sounds as boring or mundane as saying something like “I clipped my fingernails” – everyone has boring colds all the time.  I realize I’m not special, here.  My sister’s family spends at least 1/2 the year with someone ill in the house.  (When you have 5 kids, the statistics just don’t fall in your favor that everyone will stay healthy all together for very long.)  But this cold, for me, has been a backbreaker.  For some reason, a lot of the time I feel like I’m constantly wiping a nose, picking up garbage that was pulled out of the garbage can (just to have it pulled out again as soon as it was replaced), and holding someone just right so they could go to sleep, then gently leaving them be so I dont’ wake them up.  Yes – I said them.  These things seem to apply to both of my lovely sickies.

I’m happy to be the less-sick person in the house, and I’m usually happy to do my part to help and serve, but right now – I’m struggling to not have a bad attitude.  I think it’s because only a few days ago, I had high hopes for the new year starting on a real strong “git ‘er done” note.  I was going to tackle my large projects and knock some real doozies out of the park that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.  I was in a good, execution mood – ready to jump back into work with full force!

Then January 2nd rolled around and the coughing started.  Ugh.  No progress has been made on my big projects.

So this ‘stuck-in-neutral-ness’  has been my 2012.  In spite of getting zero traction on a long list of large projects that require a certain amount of concentration, I’ve been trying to compensate by hacking wildly at the leaves of the small to-dos – you know, the ones that you can easily check off your list in less than an hour’s work.  The routine auto maintenance is done on all the vehicles, the trash is taken out, the sheets are all washed, the beds are all made the carpet is vacuumed, and the kitchen counter is clean, and my email inbox is as pared down as it can get.  I feel like I’ve been putting in epic amount of effort to just keep this little bit of progress from falling back into disrepair.

So where do I go from here?  Well, I think I need to get a little more organized.  I need to get my kid and my wife back to health, and then I need to take a vacation to Tahiti.  Or somewhere.  I need an attitude transplant.

So maybe let me reflect on some 2011 memories…

2011?  It was a spectacular year.  If I had it to do over again, I’d do it all the same.  You probably know pretty much everything that happened to us in 2011 – and that it mostly revolved around welcoming our new little WEJr.  Boy does our lives revolve around him now.  And that’s a good thing.  He’s a fun little project.  He’s cute to take pictures of, and he’s fun to share with everyone else.

The best part of walking around with a kid is that it takes all the pressure and attention off of me.  No one is looking at you when you are holding a kid.  No one really wants to see you or talk to you too much.  No one wants to listen to your woes (or read your blogs) when there is a cute kid with cheeks to pinch and diapers to fill with poop.  In a way that’s a big relief, and in a way it’s a huge new burden.  But one that I’m getting used to.

And the poop doesn’t always smell bad.

Thankfully, our new ball and chain didn’t keep us too grounded in 2011.  WEJr is a great traveler, and we enjoyed trips to several places last year.  Eli met a lot of family members and drooled on things in 3 or 4 different states.

Both of our careers continue to grow and flourish.  I really can’t complain about anything there, except for the fact that we’re both starting off 2012 in the middle of large reorganizations at both of our workplaces.  This could all work out for awesomeness – or it could stick us in neutral there too… I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic for now.  I don’t want to tempt Karma.

Lets see… what else can I whine about??

I think that’s it.

I’d like to end this post on a positive note.  You know what’s amazing about our world?  I can shop from anywhere.  Anywhere.  Literally.  Home, work, the doctor’s office, the dentist’s office, the drivers seat of my car while traveling at 80mph down the freeway – and I can buy anything – and it will magically arrive on my doorstep a few days later.  Have you thought how crazy that is!  It’s insane.  We can get anything anywhere we want.  God bless the over-commercialization of America!

1. Marriage and children have scrambled my brains and exhausted my powers of thought.

I DO feel more tired, and I certainly have fewer hours in the day.  I’m waking up at 6am and going to bed at 10pm or 11pm or sometimes 8:30pm.  I have few precious, peaceful hours which aren’t work hours – and  I just have other things to do with them than think of something interesting and blog about it.  I used to think in the car and in the shower, but now I use that time to just not think, since I seem to be doing thinking most of the rest of my day.

2. My universe has shrunk so much that I have little external stimulation to prompt blog topics.

One of the themes of my blog since I got engaged 3 years ago was that I could feel my world shrinking.

You know, they say, throughout your young adulthood that “the world is your oyster.”  You can become anything you want.  You can go wherever opportunity takes you.  You can sieze the moment.  You are free.

However, marriage, family, career, and church have brought all those vast horizons down to a very local circle of concern.  I interact with, on average, the same 25-50 people every week.  If it weren’t for Facebook and other online communications, I would have very little contact with friends from earlier in my life.

I think this change has been slightly numbing.  Dont’ get me wrong – I’m very happy and wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.  I love my wife and my son – they are the most important things in my life – and I’m so blessed to have such a great job and feel a part of a church community – but living in these chosen parameters has shrunken my exposure to expansive thoughts, new experiences, and groundbreaking changes in my life.  I’m solidly anchored with the full hand of cards I’ve been dealt, and it’s gonna take a while to play this hand out.

So since I feel very little change in my life (based on where I thought I’d go or do or be), I just don’t find much novelty to blog about.

3. I’ve grown bored with even my own rhetoric.

This one is scary, but I think I’ve grown too comfortable with how I think.  I’m no longer astounded when people don’t think like I do or agree with me, and it’s harder for me to get bent out of shape when things don’t go my way.  I don’t exercise my thought processes or challenge my own assumptions often enough to create any kind of epiphany or discovery in my own thinking.  (This is kind of sad now that I’ve typed it and read it, but I think it’s at least 80% honest and accurate)

4.  I don’t find it blog-worthy that my kid just figured out how to unroll the entire toilet paper roll onto the floor while I was in the shower this morning.

A cuter, “hip parent” version of me would take pictures of him in the mess, add it to his scrap book, and write him a letter about the event he could read later on – all awesome things, don’t get me wrong.  Me?  I’m just in ornery parent mode.  I just kind of cuss under my breath and clean it up rather than post it online and revel in the new discoveries.  The goal of my blogging was always to have larger appeal than just grandparents (though they’re probably the only ones reading this now – Hi Mom, Hi Dad.), but maybe I’m wrong here.  Maybe those types of discoveries are the flavor of life my blog has been lacking?

5.  I have to go to the bathroom more often.

As one ages, it becomes more important to have close proximity to a working restroom.  Twice during this post, I’ve had to visit the lavatory, and twice I’ve completely lost my train of thought by doing so.

Little reasons like this surely add up to why this blog isn’t quite as successful as it used to be.

6. I no longer obsess over TV shows.

American Idol was fun while it lasted, but it took a serious nose dive in Simon’s last season.  Deep down I will still love the talent-show-on-TV format and I will be opinionated and critical to the core, but I’m just not feeling like it’s worth following and critiquing any of those yahoos much anymore.

7. I’m not sure who my blog audience is anymore.

I think it’s mostly just family reading this blog now.  In my blogging heyday I had all kinds of strangers (friends of friends) reading this blog, too.  Heck, I had all kinds of hits from around the world.  Granted, most of them were from my top-ranked google keyword searches to posts like “top 10 most painful things” and “private island” and “wigwam song”.  (Don’t ask me why people are searching for a wigwam song online!)

So – I’m not sure what you people want to hear about, either.  Do you want me to bloviate about politics and national issues?  Do you want me to just share pictures and stories about our family vacations and funny things WEJr does?  Or do you want me to post more of my deep philosophies that I reserve the right to change at any time?  Should I go back to challenging topics and wrestling with the large issues of the universe?  Or do you not really care at all and you’ll commit to reading anything I post like some kind of blog-reading slave?  Or should I just close the blog and move on?

Post your comments and I’ll try to figure out a strategy moving forward…

The good news was, I had my helper – who crawled over on his own volition to see what daddy was doing:

This morning, I woke up and smelled a faint smell of gas.  After poking my nose around, I found the source – the pipe next to the oven.  This same pipe had a leak about 4 years ago when I had overnight company visiting from my home town.  (It’s always heartening to company to walk into a house with a gas leak in it and know they are staying the night.)  Thankfully, the gas company has people on call 24/7 for fixing such issues – and they were called.  Now, the same spot is leaking again.  Argh!

I’m convinced that whatever crackpot plumber they got to plumb this house when it was built was high on PCP or something.  *Sigh*  The joys of home ownership!

The juxtaposition was rich!  Boy, do I have a diverse set of friends and family!!!

But does it matter?  Is the extra time we are spending with our kids, chauffeuring them to and from activities, really making a huge difference?

In this freakanomics podcast, a group of economists spend the hour trying to figure out how much parents actually matter.

I strongly recommend taking the hour to listen:

What could economists know about parenting?

Settling Nature vs Nurture…

So what really does matter in the life of a kid?  If you had to focus on one thing that could have a huge effect on your child and on yourself as a parent, what would it be?

Seriously – best podcast I’ve heard… maybe ever.

Here’s my analysis of this week’s candidates:

Still in the lead, still making all the right decisions, and still too good to be true for the party is Mitt Romney.  He had a very refreshing response when responding when religion was brought up, and handled it far better than he ever has to date, though in my opinion he went too far in patting Gov Perry on the shoulder telling him his lukewarm apology for Jefferds remarks was “OK”.  I’m not sure if it made him look incredibly magnanimous (almost to the point of push-over) or made him look like he was in too much of a hurry to let Perry off the hook and get back to the economy.  Other than that, solid performance by Romney, and I was particularly impressed that he won every shouting match with another candidate trying to horn in on his reponse time.  I didn’t think Mitt had it in him.

As this week’s insurgent, Herman Cain got much of the focus with everyone decimating his 9-9-9 plan.  I really don’t like it either for all of the reasons that Stallion Cornell outlined yesterday – but mostly because it would be a huge tax increase for me as a citizen, a consumer, and a micro-business owner.  I’m just not sure where he gets off by saying we should look at his people’s scoring and his data.  I went to his website and the data is SKETCHY!  The truth is that the “fair” tax is a huge tax break for the wealthy and a huge tax increase on the poor and middle class.  Period.  End of sentence.

Michelle Bachmann’s best moment was when she trumped everyone else’s fence proposal by pointing out that her fence would be a double fence with a security zone in between.  I thought she was going to go one step further and explain how the security zone would be constantly patrolled by the 82nd airborne.  Hallelujah border security gods!

Sadly, Rick Perry was the only one who made a lick of sense about the border, denying the absurd idea that we need a fence or that a fence would deter illegal immigration.  I say sadly, because he was a hot mess the rest of the night.  He even merited a boo from the audience when he repeatedly called Romney a hypocrite for employing a lawn care company who hired illegals.  He’s trying harder, but not really getting better results.  I’m not sure if it’s because he’s that stupid or because he is surrounded with people who are that stupid.  I’m thinking it’s a bit of both.

Newt Gingrich continues to come out with reasonable ideas – like calling the super committee a stupid idea – but his time is sadly past.  He still subscribes to Reagan-style Republicanism that most of the candidates have abandoned for Tea Party style Republicanism.  (Clearly Reagan’s 11th commandment “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican” was thrown out the window last night)  Newt shows he has the even-keeled-ness to be a good party mover and shaker again, but I dont’ know anyone who really wants him to be their President.

When it comes to talking about things no one wants to talk about, I give the victory to Rick Santorum.  He has found a way to make himself the ‘values’ candidate for the approximately 1% of voters who care about social issues right now.  His most interesting allegation was against Ron Paul, asserting that the family was the center of our society rather than the individual, to which Paul replied something like, “I’ve given birth to thousands of babies and they call come one at a time.”  To which everyone rolled their eyes.   You can always count on Paul to say something completely sensible but that you completely disagree with the more you think about it.

Jon Huntsman did what no GOP candidate would, in their right mind, do at this point in their race: decline to be on TV.  I suppose he thought the high school cafeteria in New Hampshire would be more integral to his presidential bid; and he might be right.  If his strategy is to focus on New Hampshire, threaten to boycott any caucus that occurs before the NH primary, and try to come in 2nd or 3rd in New Hampshire, it’s the right strategy.  It’s really all he has left.  He’s gotta be running low on money and low on will to try and make himself look appealing as a moderate in this crowd of Tea Party panderers.  I know I would be.

After the debate, I watched NBC’s The Sing Off, which I had recorded from the day before.  and pictured all the candidates in an acapella group together…

As I suspected, the stories in this article represent both sides – both the joy and the difficulty –  of working as an ecclesiastical leader.  The young man’s story of wise counsel setting his life on a better path is just one of thousands that likely occured during Mitt’s tenure as Bishop and Stake President.  Those are the easy ones to talk about.  One the other hand, I would advise the world to reserve judgement about Mitt’s counsel to families making difficult decisions.  Sometimes an ecclesiastical leader will feel moved to counsel two different people about the same issue two different ways.  Though Bishops are instructed not to specifically counsel couples for or against divorce as a resolution to their marital difficulties, I’ve known instances where the leader was relieved by a divorce and instances where they were saddened by a divorce.  Context makes a world of difference, and no newspaper article could ever provide the full context for any such exchange between priest and congregant.

Also, my friend McKay Coppins posted an interesting (but unsurprising) article about leaked emails from the Perry campaign’s religious advisors have reacted and plotted in regards to Mitt’s religion, and their hopes of sinking his candidacy through its marginalization.

It appears that the inseparable siamese twins, religion and politics, are just heating up for the GOP primary.

Do you think it gets worse before it gets better?

Any of my non-LDS readers have a problem with Mitt’s religion or past as a lay leader of the religion?

This week his new trick is to knee crawl and push himself into a standing position (under the right conditions).  He hasn’t yet learned to pull himself up by things – we can wait longer for that one as far as I’m concerned.  His head has already taken a beating in the last few weeks as he’s learned the harsh reality of losing his balance around the house.

Enjoy!