Romney wins big tonight and as I predicted from the beginning, he is going to win the nomination. But even though his speech tonight points toward the general election by calling for unity against Obama, he still has a fight on his hand. Gingrich is not going to quit. He has risen from the dead before and he is so arrogant that he thinks he can do it again. Plus he really dislikes Romney. He does not care if it causes the Republican the election, he is going to fight to the end. He has no chance to win but will force Romney to stay on the right of center.

Paul is not going to quit either. He never had a chance to win but he is not running for reelection to Congress and he wants to have a say in the Republican convention. If he is totally ignored, I think he may run as a third party. If he does and Romney is nominated, he will pull votes from the Republicans and help Obama. Maybe not as much as Ross Perot helped Clinton, but it would be important in this close race. Ironically, I think if Gingrich somehow wins the nomination, Paul would actually take votes from Obama. Of course, Gingrich cannot be Obama so in this case Paul would not make any difference. So if I was advising the Republicans, they should let Romney win now and give Paul token recognition at the convention and adopt some of his ideas. For example, they can advocte gold standard, which will never pass, and hope Paul does not go to a third party.

Well, now we have a race in the Republican nomination process! Just a week ago Romney was on the verge of winning the first 3 states, unprecedented for someone who is not a sitting president. Now in one week he loses Iowa where he was declared the winner couple of weeks ago, and he gets stomped by Gingrich in South Carolina. I am thinking that the evangelicals who voted for Gingrich must think that he is Jesus. After all he has risen from the dead! How else can you explain that people who claim that they see moral values as very important can support a man who was accused by his ex-wife for immoral behavior. Even if you think that the ex-wife is unreliable, since she did cheat with him when he was married to someone else, the fact remains that he cheated at least twice. His supporters will say that Clinton cheated. Yes, and as I said before; if you disqualified everyone who cheated, you have eliminated half of the population. But to cheat when your wife is dying, like Gingrich and John Edwards, that would be a much lower low. Now by blaming the media, Gingrich gets more support? I think I have said this before: Whenever someone claims moral value or moral authority, you have to take their words with a grain of salt.

In fact I think I might have said that above when the PSU scandal came out. I did agree with the firing of Paterno because I think as the idol of the university he should have done more when he found out about the abuse. To those who said he got the raw deal, I say that they would feel differently if their brother or son were to be abused by Sandusky after Paterno had found out. Having said this, I felt very sad to hear of Paterno's passing this morning. I think it is extremely unfortunate that his legacy will be tainted by this episode. I also think the burden of this made his illness much worse and led to a much faster death. I think for most of his life, he lived it with integrity and did a lot to help many young men. I think the situation with Sandusky was something that people of "old school" really never had to deal with. If Paterno had retired when he was 70 years old like most coaches, he would never had to deal with this scandal. Unfortunately he stayed too long and being a basically good person, this had to have tormented him to the end. May he rest in peace and hopefully history will be kind to him.

I read an article today that said that George Romney, father of Mitt, was born in Mexico. I am positive that when George ran for president in 1968, nobody made a big deal out of this. Obviously if he was elected, he could not serve since he was not born in the U.S. So why was he running and why it was not all over the news then? I would have thought that his opponents like Nixon would have pointed that out. I understand that George's maternal grandfather was a Mexican citizen. Would Mitt then be our first Hispanic president if he is elected?

Romney has been attacked by Gingrich and Perry over his previous work at Bain capital. I have mix feeling about this attack. The complaints in these ads is that Bain had to fire a lot of employees in trying to restructure companies. Well, obviously these companies were not run efficiently in the first place otherwise they would not be in such deep trouble. Any attempt to make them more efficient would require cutting employees. So in that sense the attacks are unfair. But of course Romney campaigns on the notion that his work at Bain CREATED many jobs. That is not true either. Sure some companies made it back and thus eventually hired people again. But those are not jobs created but were brought back. Also some companies eventually failed and the jobs never came back. The point is the companies that made it back had good products or business to begin with. It was just poorly managed. By involving a venture capitalist, some of the debts were forgiven and some of the pension obligations went away, allowing the company to start over. It was not Bain or Romney who created a new product or business that led to hiring of people. Overall, the jobs total at the end of the day with these type of buyouts or whatever you want to call it, is about even.

A few days ago Obama and Panetta announced that the military will be cut back. Basically the number of soldiers and marines will be cut with the resources more focused on Iran and China. I agree with the strategy although I am not sure we need to tell the world that we are most worried about Iran and China. Even though not much has been heard from the Republican candidates so far, possibly because they are busy fighting each other, I am sure they will all be attacking Obama on this. But let's look at this logically. We spend more on defense than the next 10 countries combine. Even when Britain was colonizing the world, they only spent about as much as the next two countries combine. The old idea that we need an armed force to fight two land wars at the same time is outdated. Our challenges in the future will be terrorism for which we need special forces and better intelligence and keeping the shipping lanes open for which we need a big naval force. The shipping lanes of the Middle East and South China sea are crucial for economic and national security reasons. So I think this plan is reasonable.

As I said, the Republicans will be all over this. Take Iran, for example. Every Republican candidate except for Paul and Huntsman say they will attack Iran if it makes a nuclear weapon. Why is Iran a threat to us? Frankly they are not. Israel thinks Iran is a threat to it. So we are volunteering to attack Iran because Israel feels threatened? I say let Israel's great air force take care of Israel's interest. Even if Iran gets nuclear weapons they are not going to use it against us or Israel because they know it would be the end of them if they choose to attack. The truth is Iran is way more scare than we are. They are surrounded by countries who don't like them. Their economy is falling apart. If we attack them it would just arouse nationalism and give the regime more legitimacy.

This illustrates how lack of understanding of the world Rick Perry is: He is advocating that we go back to Iraq because of the increased in violence since we pulled out. He says that Iran has become more influential in Iraq. Well, if we were worried about Iran in Iraq, then maybe we should not have got rid of Hussein. Hussein was our "friend" because he was an enemy of Iran. By the way, Hussein was a Sunni, so when we got rid of him the Shiites took over. Shiites are the main sect in Iran so that is why Iraq and Iran are getting along better now. The violence recently is by Sunnis attacking Shiites. So if we go back in we would be helping the Shiites which would be welcomed by Iran. This is how little Perry understands the world!

The Big Ten has completed its bowl season. It was a disaster. Somehow they got 10 teams into bowl games. I even missed the Purdue-Western Mich. game as I didn't think that there could be more than 9 bowl teams from this mediocre conference. My predictions were not as precise as in the past couple of years. I over optimistically predicted that the Big Ten will go 6-3. They actually went 3-6, excluding Purdue, which I would have picked. But on further analysis, I did beat LBOAYM who predicted 5-4 because I was actually 6-3 in my predictions! LBOAYM was 5-4 in his predictions. The 3 games we differed was NW, MSU and Nebraska. I was right on 2 of these. LBOAYM could have tied me if he had not worried about jinxing himself and failed to pick his own MSU team!

It was not just the win-loss records but the overall performances were poor. Illinois barely beat a terrible UCLA team. MSU and Mich. were both lucky to eked out OT wins. Only Wisconsin was respectable in defeat. This does not do anything for the reputation of the Big Ten.

Not to be discouraged, I am going to make a few predictions right now for 2012. New England to win the Super Bowl. Vancouver to win the Stanley Cup. Miami to win the NBA. The Angels to win the World Series. Despite the close race in Iowa tonight, I predict that Mitt Romney will win the Republican nomination. This one was the easiest to call. More predictions for 2012 in the near future, before Dec. 31 certainly!