But your “doctor” still won’t refer you to a chiropractor. Because those guys are… “quacks.” It would seem, however, that most of the real quacks have the initials ‘M.D.’ after their names. They treat what they do not understand.

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Hull House, a hallowed Chicago institution for 123 years, recently closed due to lack of funds. For generations, it was the crown jewel of American settlement houses, important enough to be mentioned in history textbooks, and also an ongoing source of local civic pride. Today, every Chicagoan, from Mayor Emanuel and the city’s corporate fathers, to those in the Occupy Chicago movement should be ashamed at how the public has virtually ignored the death of Hull House.

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There seems to be a spreading belief that we are living in horrible times, and a reflection of those times is the bitter atmosphere in Washington.  Hatred!  Vilification!  The politics of personal destruction!  Fanaticism!  Oh, I just can’t go on.

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Here’s why the GOP presidential race and whom we settle on as the ultimate nominee matters: Politico reports that the White House has been telling progressives that they’re going to “love” Obama’s State of the Union address tonight. If we don’t defeat Obama in November, America will be gone. And once she’s gone, that’s it. Game over. For us and the rest of the world.

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It’s often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. President Obama keeps giving us the same thing—the same policies, the same rhetoric, the same tone—over and over again. I’m not sure he expects a different result, though. And that’s the point: he’s neither insane nor stupid. He’s a pure leftist ideologue who will not—indeed, cannot—change.

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With South Carolina in his pocket and momentum clearly shifting, I wondered what the economy under a Gingrich administration might look like. With the caveat that anything is better than what we have, I find a lot of the stuff that Newt espouses is red meat for a free market guy like me. Having said that; here is what he says he would do:

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In light of recent accusations from his ex-wife Marianne, Newt Gingrich would probably prefer to forget the time he drew a picture showing the two of them at the center of their universe.

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We’ve got a mixed bag today. Google reported and missed. Microsoft reported and missed. Intuitive Surgical reported and hit big. IBM reported and missed revenues while hitting profits. The end results; Google got nailed overnight; Microsoft went up; Intuitive Surgical went down big while IBM was up nicely.

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Let’s just take a quick look at some of the headlines and try to piece together precisely what is going on in the United States economy. Wells Fargo reports billions in quarterly profits beating estimates while Citigroup misses badly. France’s triple a credit rating goes by the boards and our own government lawmakers pushed new spending of $1 Trillion last year.  Iran continues to threaten the supply chain of oil through the straits of Hormuz and we continue to block the Keystone XL pipeline preferring to purchase our oil from Venezuela and Brazil rather than Canada.

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At last, someone is trying to get people to stop wearing their pajamas out in public, and all I can say, is a resounding, it’s about time!

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Friday the thirteenth, so far, stock market wise, is ugly. As I write this the market is down 140 points on the Dow and a like percentage in the other indices, and I think you can blame yesterday. The jobs report yesterday was lousy and yet the market the market went up a smidge. Why? The news was bad yesterday; not today; how come it went up yesterday and is down high today? I have no idea.

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Associated Press reports that former President Jimmy “The Kook” Carter this week said there’s nothing wrong with Islamists taking over Egypt, because that’s the will of the Egyptian people.

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Progress! Last year it took ’til almost two months into the new year for us to hear from our non-Muslimy Balkans Muslim friends whom we “rescued” from Christian Serbs and the jaws of civilization. This year, we’re only about a week in, and already we’re experiencing that familiar Balkan gratitude. (Though 2010 beats out 2012 by a day.)

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The newspaper story says the state is threatening to withhold some $2 million from two schools here that didn’t meet their test score goals.

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So, evidently, the Islamo-Fascists – or one of them, at least –  have developed a new way to attack the world’s Jews, stealthily, by remote control, as their victims try to go about living normal lives.

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We now have the first race of 2012 under our belts. It was simultaneously exciting and boring. Exciting because it was a three-way race for much of the night, then it was a two-way race between the Dominant Guy and the Dark Horse, and then it was the Dominant Guy by a mere 8 votes. Boring because we conservatives are still saying, “Are we really going to go into this war with Barack Obama for the future of the country…with this group?” Sigh.

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On the campaign trail, Ron Paul has been talking about his support for Ronald Reagan.

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It has been a full year since the earth was relieved of the weight of one Richard Holbrooke this month last year, on December 13, 2010. I wanted to mark the one-year anniversary of his death since it is still many years before the world will recover from his life. While I feel I’ve already written apt eulogies, some things came up afterwards, most notably a painful-to-read piece of praise in Jerusalem Post at the time by Israeli former UN ambassador Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Gold may be “one of the good ones,” as my philo-Semitic Italian friend puts it, but he is woefully wrong about what sort of man Holbrooke was.

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To get an audience with a head of state, typically, one must have accomplished or been party to something of significance, and I guess that’s true with “Palestine,” too. It’s just that it seems that what qualifies as a significant achievement there diverges considerably from what most other cultures would find appropriate.

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So, UNESCO, an arm of that failed experiment known as the United Nations that recently voted “Palestine” into its ranks as a full member, will bring to the Palestinians’ attention that they’re producing a children’s magazine that that glorifies Hitler.

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Over the past day or so, we’ve gotten the news of the deaths of two prominent global leaders: former Czech president Vaclav Havel and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

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1. After the latest GOP debate, the race is still Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich, but the other candidates really helped themselves with strong, confident performances—with the exception of Ron Paul, who really hurt himself with his dovish answers on Iran, which revealed that he’s living in a bizarre, dangerous unreality.

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For forty years, his passion was teaching Moby Dick. Mr. G was my high school English teacher and for six weeks each year, he would parse “The Great American Novel” with a obsession like that of one-legged Captain Ahab pursuing the Great White Whale. Our eyes glazed over as he attempted, vainly, to captivate us with Melville’s tedious digressions about Nantucket whaling villages. Undeterred, Mr. G forged on. In retrospect, his single-minded devotion was touching. At the time however, his fixation was the epitome of high school torture.

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He once supported a value-added tax.

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In 1988, he said that we were in a political civil war and that we should fight it with “savagery.”

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The latest polls of the Republican presidential field show Newt Gingrich holding on to and in some instances, expanding his lead over Mitt Romney. Romney still holds a commanding lead in New Hampshire, but it’s been dramatically cut by in-roads from Gingrich over the past few weeks. The other candidates are well behind, and while it’s possible that Ron Paul (who’s running in third place in many early contests) or someone else could score, it’s unlikely to hold as the primary process drags on.

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     I’ve often thought that reviewers should attend screenings in which the credits are withheld until after they have critiqued the film;  perhaps there would be more honest responses if people didn’t know what big names were attached.  Both the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal gave rave reviews to “Young Adult,” a confused film written by Diablo Cody and directed by Ivan Reitman, the winning duo of “Juno,” a very good previous movie which deserved all its accolades.  In “Young Adult,” we start with a former prom queen, played by a far too beautiful Charlize Theron, who is clearly on her way down, fueling her descent with generous amounts of alcohol and self-deception.  A childless, bitter divorcee at 37, she impulsively decides to return to Mercury, the small town where she once was the big fish, to recapture a gloried past, personified by her high school boyfriend, now married and a new father.  Along the way, she meets the man who once occupied the school locker next to hers, now a crippled victim of a misguided hate crime who serves as her drinking buddy and her voice of clarity and conscience.

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Of Newt Gingrich, Clinton said:

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Today, addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington DC, Mitt Romney drew a clear contrast between his vision for America and that of President Barack Obama, stressing that “[Obama] is seeking to make a merit-based society into an entitlement society.”

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In MSNBC ads, Rachel Maddow has been pointing to bridges and other public works as examples of the need for government. Private enterprise cannot produce the public goods we need, she says. Perhaps surprisingly, Newt Gingrich has long been making the very same case.  More here.

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