I may be a squish, but doggonit, I’m a Christianist squish.

Via the Transom: The closest I’ll ever get to the belly of a real beast.

How to max out costs on a single Starbucks beverage.

Jen Rubin does not seem to understand the reasoning behind Catholic opposition to artificial contraception: “The impression that Santorum finds the prevalent practice of birth control ‘harmful to women’ is, frankly, mind-numbing.”

I’d recommend she read John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. (She could either order it from Amazon or get the individual speeches free from EWTN.) She might not end up agreeing that a regime of artificial contraception diminishes the dignity of the human person and fosters a culture where women are increasingly objects to be used. But I suspect she’d be struck by how many of the predicted social evils have followed it. (There are, of course, many reasonable counter-arguments she could make–beginning with correlation/causation and ending with lesser-of-two-ills.)

Even so, at least she’d understand the theology and theory of the position and wouldn’t be so confused.

Mitt Romney’s big calling card is his experience taking over troubled enterprises with underperforming assets and laying off all the workers selling them for component parts turning them around. I wonder what Bain Romney would say about Campaign Romney if he were brought in as a consultant.

Would Bain Romney think that the campaign, as an organization, is using resources wisely and efficiently? Would he think the management structure was sound? Would he like the way the campaign’s product line has been reshuffled, while the management team remained mostly intact? What would he make of the campaign’s HR-side of the house–which keeps Norm Coleman but fires the worker who coached the candidate to two winning debates?

Most of all, it would be interesting to know what the famously data-driven Bain Romney makes of Campaign Romney’s leadership.

I’m not asking this to be snarky–honestly–but because I’d love to read someone smart (Megan McArdle? Avik Roy?) do something along these lines. If he was still with us, my friend Dean Barnett (a Romney guy, through and through) would have crushed this piece. Just one more reason to miss him.

The best $3 I’ve spent in the last month was picking up the DVD of the very first G.I. Joe miniseries, what my friends and I all referred to colloquially as “The M.A.S.S. Device.” This weekend I re-watched it for the first time in probably 25 years. Some thoughts:

* It’s ridiculous in the particulars. I was really struck by the various accents used for characters, which are mock-worthy. Cobra Commander’s terrible hissing lisp. Snow Job’s wicked Bahstan accent. The most ludicrous was the eskimo who finds Snake-Eyes in the snowy forests of the North Pole. (Yes.) He’s blind, of course. And he has a thick Irish brogue.

* Some of the artwork is similarly ridiculous. Destro, for instance, has a red medallion on a gold chain around his neck. Maybe that would have fit in the ’70s, but this is an ’80s production. It’s nuts. But not as nuts as the fact that Destro’s mask has thick, dark eyebrows on it. And that, in many scenes, he’s drawn to be about 7′ tall.

* Sample dialogue: “Eye in the sky, go in hi! Gung Ho Joe is goin’ in low!”

Brutal.

* All of that said, “The M.A.S.S. Device” holds up really well because at the core, it’s well-constructed story-telling. The plot establishes very clear motives and objectives for both the G.I. Joes and Cobra. The playing field it sets up is large-scale–from the North Pole to the deepest ocean. Volcanoes! Jungles! The Cobra gladiator arena! You name it. Yet the story never spends too much time in one place, moving relentlessly forward at a brisk pace. And it’s efficiently told, too. There’s nothing included that doesn’t pay off in some way.

Most importantly, the writers went to some trouble to establish Cobra as a worthy adversary early on. The Joe’s meet with several defeats so that, while we all know what the final outcome will be, the outcome of each of the intervening conflicts is always in doubt.

* And while a lot of the execution of the story-telling isn’t top-shelf, overall, more care was put into this than Hasbro/Marvel needed to. The scene transitions are done artfully. There’s some rudimentary character development. There’s a real effort made to give even minor figures–such as Breaker and Steeler–character moments.

All in all, it’s a nice piece of cartoon story-telling. You can see now why a generation of boys regarded it as one of the great epics of our time.

Romney’s entirely predictable attacks on Santorum.

I’ve never met James Pethokoukis. I only know him by his work, which I generally admire.

But it would be nice if he would get out of my head.

Seriously. It’s kind of creepy.