Paul Ryan and his mother will be touring Florida this weekend and will be visiting the Villages, a large retirement center north of Orlando. I conjured such a Ryan trip to the Villages in a recent blog post here but admit that I completely mis-underestimated the potential leverage of Ryan bringing his mother along for the ride. In contrast to Romney, who shower-sang "America the Beautiful" at the Villages a few weeks ago, Ryan is likely to generate the best T.V. footage of the campaign there.

I've been worried the past couple of days that Ryan, Romney/ Koch might be making some headway on the Medicare attacks. The thing that might have gotten some traction was the linking of Medicare reforms to the dreaded Obamacare. I thought Obama was a little slow on the uptake. But what I didn't realize was that Joe Biden set a trap for Romney who just tee-ed up the ball for Obama to hit out of the park. Biden's faux pas was intended to put Romney on a high and loosen his tongue---because Romney can't keep his mouth shut. Especially when it comes to embellishing his argument.

In case you've never heard of a retirement community in Florida called The Villages, it's a destination plot for Midwesterners who want to sit back and enjoy life, and on most weekends, act like teenagers. Some of my friends from high school live there, including my cousin, Eddie, whose wife died several years ago from a massive stroke. Eddie describes his life now in what could be termed a steroidal wish fulfillment of those Saturday nights when we wrestled with our dates at the drive-in movies back home. 

The Villages is one of the strangest environments I have ever encountered. It eerily resembles the totalitarian and idyllic setting of the Patrick McGoohan T.V. series, "The Prisoner"---which was based in a fictional town/resort known as---you guessed it---The Village. Words have failed to describe the Villages in Florida until the recent appearance of an article by Michael Van Sickler in the Sunday Tampa Bay Times. (link in comment below) It is delicious reading. The writer describes the very much in control Republican owner of the Villages and his attendant bastion of forty thousand reliable Republican voter/residents. As goes cousin Eddie and the Villages so goes the Ryan/Romney ticket in Florida.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi stunned the country today by firing the military leaders who were his chief rivals for power, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and chief of staff Sami Anan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19234763

I think Morsi has pulled it off.

For one thing, he's named a bunch of other SCAFers to succeed Tantawi and Anan, and those guys aren't whining about his right to do so.

Why Paul Ryan was picked seems pretty clear to me. Romney was losing and he was being hammered by the right wing of his own party, without which support he couldn't even win the Republican base, let alone the middle of the electorate. Romney's Freudian slip that Ryan "is the next President of the United States" helps confirm, to my mind, that as a party, and given that Romney was losing, the future of the party itself was a major ingredient in the pressure Romney was receiving and his final V.P decision.

Pull up a chair, kiddos, Uncle Paracles has a Fable.

Once upon a time there was a bad bad man with lots of money....

People seem confused about the Romney selection.

Why does he need to please the base so much?

He has plenty of money....

The base are still likely to vote for him - he needs the independents...

Okay, here's the deal - the choice of Ryan means Romney's been captured by tea party/nuttism.

And that nuttism, as seen from Kansas the last few weeks, has been brutally effective.

This is the lull before the storm, the final moments within which to settle the character of the presidential campaign of 2012. Even in the lull, however, the likely lines-of-march are already clear – lines that, if unaltered, should give far more comfort to conservatives than they do right now to progressives.

Following an announcement by the Romney campaign that universal healthcare was available somewhere back East, Interstate routes 80, 70 and 40 were clogged with old cars, pickup trucks and U-Hauls in what looked to be the largest mass migration since the 1930's.

Google map servers crashed as millions searched for information about Massachusetts. In the confusion Wikipedia opened a page on a state called Massatuusetts, and wily contributors had a field day misdirecting folks to out West somewhere---"it's between California and Nevada", people were yelling out to others in the McDonalds drive-thru lanes.

Although the fall campaign has yet to begin, its inauspicious shape already seems set.  And I believe it is possible to make some general predictions about the outcome, and to ask some large question about what comes after.

It seems very likely that no grand new ideas are going to emerge; no mandates for sweeping change will be delivered to the victor; no moral clarity will be established; no attenuation of corporate power will be accomplished; no revival of national purpose will take shape.