Rule 5 Monday: Prairie Rose

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— compiled by Wombat-socho


Bring The Heat, Bring The Stupid kicks off the week with a selection of Megyn Kelly pix and also Sasha Alexander. The Rio Norte Line has Jessica-Jane Clement up his sleeve, Threedonia offers a fascinating combination of unapologetic rich gals Salma Hayek and Katy Perry, and the POH Diaries follow up on our Live At Five item last week about Kate Winslet and her Anti-Cosmetic Surgery League. Also, Maryeve Dufault! (Troglopundit is not impressed.) Fishersville Mike notes Laura Bell Bundy‘s transition to the consultant ranks, Randy’s Roundtable breaks for Lauren Pope and Carissa Rosario, while Reaganite Republican brings us up to date on the critical Romanian pop music scene with Alexandra Stan.
Eye of Polyphemus keeps confusing me by not posting hot chicks from SF series; this week, it’s Petra Silander.


Zion’s Trumpet makes its Rule 5 debut with Julia Lescova and Denise Milani. A View From The Beach also notes Salma Hayek’s lack of regrets, and has some advice for Nicolas Sarkozy about his supermodel wife. Postaldog offers some Drew Barrymore a la nu, and some Teri Polo cheesecake as well.


Hookers & Booze cleans out the random pics folder, adds a hooker or two1 and celebrates being first in last week’s Rule 5 roundup. Wyblog chips in with some Saturday night sunglasses and some Rule 5 linkagery of his own, and Proof Positive links us to Brooke Hogan, some vintage Angela Lansbury (no, really!), and a shot of Paris Hilton getting off on a Carl’s Jr. Spicy Burger. Mmmm, caliente!


Speaking of caliente, El Opinador Compulsivo fights the cold of a Southern Hemisphere winter with some potpourri, a Brazilian soccer girl, more beach photos, (this one with more thongery), the sadness of a business trip, a photo profile of his loyal Israeli reader Shay, a gal with a katana, and an extract from the TSA procedures manual.


Serr8d also debuts this week, with Candice Swanepoel, while Maggie’s Notebook opts for Girls With Guns this week. (No Tommy Shaw?)
Dustbury this week offers scorching pianist Yuja Wang and auto exec Laura Soave. Speaking of Ms. Swanepoel, American Power brings the video; also featured are videos of Denise Milani video, Julie Henderson, a link to a Julia Lescova slideshow, and some bonus Lescova.


At The Camp of the Saints, it’s Julia Fiore, the Rule Five News, and Barbara Hillary.


Soylent Green starts the week (as he does every week) with the Monday Motivationer, follows with Tuesday night titskis, Raquel Gibson for humpday, some very fine corsetry with even finer filling, a salute to Google and Steamboat McGoo, Georgia Karabinis, and a response to complaints about airbrushing.


This week, the DaleyGator leads off with Silvan Krispin, and Eva Mendes before boarding the Maryeve Dufault train. A celebration of NFL cheerleaders follows, as does Yuja Wang (with bonus video!), Faith Hill, and Nikita Penalosa


Thanks to all for their Rule 5 linkagery! To be included in next week’s roundup, please have your links in to Rule 5 Wombat no later than Saturday, August 27.

How Many Ounces of Gold Does It
Take to Buy a House in Baltimore?

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Answer: Fewer today than it did yesterday!

Gold prices have been on a tear lately, topping a fresh record high above $1,900 an ounce late Monday — just two weeks after rising above $1,800. . . .
Gold prices rose 2.4% during the regular trading session to settle at $1,891.90 an ounce. In after hours electronic trading, prices topped $1,900 an ounce for the first time.

That CNN story quotes analysts worried about a “bubble,” but we’ve been hearing “gold bubble” worry-wart chatter for months and yet the price still keeps going up, up, up!

Simple question: Six months from now, will gold be more likely selling at $1,900 an ounce or $2,500 an ounce? If you think the price still has room to rise, then keep buying. Most analysts don’t see an end to the gold rush any time this year, so there’s probably still a chance to profit.

Nevertheless, if you bought gold a while back and are thinking about cashing out some of your profits, last month I told you about one Forbes writer’s idea: Sell gold, buy real estate. Adrian Ash provided this chart:

Saturday I told you that hundreds of houses in Baltimore have sold for less than $10,000 this year. Has the real estate market hit rock bottom? Probably not yet:

An ominous cloud is hanging over the housing market: Millions of distressed properties could be put up for sale at any moment, potentially adding to the glut of unsold homes that are already on the market and depressing home prices even further.

So it’s possible that housing prices will decline further, just like it’s possible that gold prices will keep rising to $2,500. Yet we seem to be approaching that market-fulcrum point when a gold-for-housing exchange will yield maximum value.

Fifteen months ago, when gold was selling for less than $1,200 an ounce, it would have taken about eight ounces of gold to buy one of those under-$10,000 Baltimore bargains. Today the price is closer to five ounces. YSHLTGB.


Paul Ryan Nixes 2012 White House Bid

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The Weekly Standard has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for this idea, and now breaks the news to the readers it has been hyping up:

Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan has decided for a final time that he will not run for president in 2012, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned. Ryan, who began seriously considering a bid in late May after Indiana governor Mitch Daniels took himself out of the race, had consulted with top Republicans, including Karl Rove and Frank Luntz, as he contemplated his political future. . . . Ryan ultimately decided to continue his focus on debt and entitlement reform as chairman of the House Budget Committee.
“I sincerely appreciate the support from those eager to chart a brighter future for the next generation. While humbled by the encouragement, I have not changed my mind, and therefore I am not seeking our party’s nomination for President. I remain hopeful that our party will nominate a candidate committed to a pro-growth agenda of reform that restores the promise and prosperity of our exceptional nation. I remain grateful to those I serve in Southern Wisconsin for the unique opportunity to advance this effort in Congress.”

You’ll notice — or at least, I noticed — that the hyping of Ryan as a 2012 candidate (long after he had already said he wouldn’t run) got more intense after T-Paw dropped and Perry got in. That’s your clue that there are specific people who were behind this bogus bandwagon for their own particular purposes. Same deal with the endless Chris Christie chatter.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Ryan and would have liked for him to get in for 2012, but there’s a lot of factional intrigue behind some of these things. Not to mention consultants wanting contracts, speechwriters wanting jobs, vendors wanting clients, etc.

Electoral politics is a multi-million-dollar industry, and if you think it’s all about ideas and idealism, you’re waaaaay wrong.

UPDATE: Nate Silver has charts — lots and lots of shiny colorful charts!

‘Unexpectedly’: Voters in NY-9 District Realize President Obama Is a ‘Moron’

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By now you’ve noticed how bad economic news in the Obama age is always “unexpected” according to liberal reporters. Now the failure of Obamanomics seems to be intruding into the political sphere:

Of all the places to hear fulminations against President Obama, one of the least expected is the corner of 71st Avenue and Queens Boulevard, in the heart of a Congressional district that propelled Democrats like Geraldine A. Ferraro, Charles E. Schumer and Anthony D. Weiner to Washington.
But it was there that Dale Weiss, a 64-year-old Democrat, approached the Republican running for Congress in a special election and, without provocation, blasted the president for failing to tame runaway federal spending. “We need to cut Medicaid,” she declared, “but he won’t do that.” She shook her head in disgust. “He is a moron.”
After nodding approvingly for a time, the Republican candidate, Bob Turner, signaled for an assistant to cut off Ms. Weiss. Frustration with Mr. Obama is so widespread, he explained later, that he tries to limit such rants to about 30 seconds, or else they will consume most of his day.
“It’s endemic in the district,” Mr. Turner said. “You can’t stop them once they get started.”
The Sept. 13 election was expected to be a sleepy sideshow — a mere formality that would put David I. Weprin, a Democratic state assemblyman and heir to a Queens political dynasty, into a Congressional seat that became vacant this summer when Mr. Weiner quit over an online sex scandal.
Instead, the race has become something far more unsettling to Democrats: a referendum on the president and his party that is highlighting the surprisingly raw emotions of the electorate.
National Democrats, alarmed by a poll that showed the contest far closer than anticipated, are privately fretting that even a close outcome in a working-class swath of Brooklyn and Queens may foreshadow broader troubles for the party in 2012.
The Siena College poll, conducted early this month, showed Mr. Weprin with an advantage of 6 percentage points, within the margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 points.
Suddenly Mr. Weprin’s aides have ramped up fund-raising, enlisting big-name figures like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman to headline events. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has dispatched operatives to advise the candidate. And the campaign, aided by big city unions, is drawing up an extensive field operation to turn out the vote.

Read the rest — thanks to Bert the Samoan Lawyer for the tip.

Unlike Barack Obama, I hate to encourage false hope and impossible dreams, but NY-9 may be a heckuva lot more winnable for Republicans than even the freaked-out Democrats fear.

The district’s Cook Partisan Voting Index rating is only D+5 — not nearly as prohibitively partisan as Jerry Nadler’s 8th District (D+22), for example. And remember how fired up we got for Sean Bielat’s challenge to Barney Frank? The Cook PVI rating for Frank’s MA-4 district is D+14. So if a bunch of bloggers and Tea Party types could put the fear into Barney — and we had him sweating, didn’t we? — we might actually be able to beat this Democrat second-teamer Dave Weprin.

But we’ve got to get cracking, folks: Sept. 13 is just three weeks from Tuesday, so go give Bob Turner $20 or $50 or $100 now and then help spread the word via Twitter, Facebook or e-mail to all your friends: A Republican could win this NY-9 special election, so please give now!

UPDATE: Just today Bob Turner was endorsed by the NY Sun.

BOB TURNER FOR CONGRESS
He Never Tweeted Pictures of His Junk to a Porn Star

T-Paw and ‘Robust Internationalism’

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What to make of this article by Jamie M. Fly in Foreign Policy?

The departure of Gov. Tim Pawlenty from the race for the Republican nomination for president deprives national security conservatives of one of the field’s leading champions of a robust internationalism. Despite the ludicrous rants of Rep. Ron Paul and efforts by some Tea Party organizations to back significant defense cuts, most of the remaining Republican contenders appear to be relatively hawkish. However, Pawlenty’s willingness to speak out on foreign policy and to push back against undercurrents of isolationism in the party will be sorely missed.

You can read the whole thing. My inner cynic tells me that the true subtext is: “One of Jamie Fly’s buddies was an adviser to Pawlenty on national security issues and is now hustling around for another campaign gig, so let me praise T-Paw as a way of promoting my buddy’s job-search.”

But that’s just my inner cynic talking. Less cynically, I’m mystified that Fly’s article didn’t mention Rick Santorum as a spokesman for “robust internationalism.” It’s probably because Fly wants to limit the discussion to candidates he thinks might actually hire his now-unemployed former T-Paw adviser buddy. (Damn that inner cynic! Always interrupting …) And most of the experts rate Santorum’s campaign as a hopeless long-shot, as opposed to Pawlenty’s can’t-miss campaign which, alas, imploded at its first contact with actual Republican voters.

Insofar as it involves actual policy — as opposed to politics — I am skeptical of Fly’s worries about an internecine GOP conflict between “robust internationalism” and “undercurrents of isolationism.” Is Fly attempting to throw us on the horns of a false dilemma? Does he overlook the possibility that the arguably excessive hawkishness of the Bush presidency could afford to be tempered by a mild dose of the “isolationism” he so dreads? Continue reading T-Paw and ‘Robust Internationalism’ →

Because The Olympics Is All About Athletes And Competition, Right?

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by Smitty

The Puffington Host:

The U.S. Olympic Committee has notified all interested cities that it will not submit a bid to host the 2020 Olympics, a person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press on Monday.
Chicago, New York and Dallas were among those that had expressed interest in putting forth a bid to host the games, but any bid was contingent upon the USOC working out a long-simmering revenue-sharing deal with the International Olympic Committee.

The Olympics is like the U.N. in better physical condition, and with a more reasonable world impact.

Herman Cain on Janeane Garofalo: ‘I Wanted to Send Her a Thank You Note’

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Left-wing actress Janeane Garofalo told Keith Olberman last week that she thinks someone in the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy — she named Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers as likely suspects — must be secretly paying Herman Cain to run for president. At the opening of Cain’s new campaign headquarters in Manchester, N.H., Da Tech Guy caught the candidate’s mirthful reaction:

Anyone who knows Herman Cain knows that he is a cheerful, optimistic kind of guy who — having beaten cancer five years ago — is grateful for every new day. He easily laughs off a slur from an idiot like Garofalo.

So who are the secret right-wingers who are paying Herman Cain to run for president? That would be you: Thousands of ordinary Americans, patriotic grassroots conservatives giving whatever they can afford to keep his “Common Sense Solutions” bus rolling. As the Cain campaign said in Friday’s fund-raising e-mail, “even $5, $10, $25 helps” — and they could have added, “helps to drive Janeane Garofalo even crazier than she already is.” You can donate now.

Also check out the rest of Da Tech Guy’s coverage of Cain’s recent two-day tour of New Hampshire:

DNC Quotes Governor Asterisk

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During my Iowa trip, I began referring to Jon Huntsman as “Governor Asterisk,” because his support in the GOP primaries is somewhere between “too small to be measured” and utterly non-existent. He is an irrelevant footnote to the campaign, a spokesman for no meaningful Republican constituency, who clutters up the stage at debates and gets vastly more media attention than he deserves.

Instapundit last night linked a Politico column pointing out that the Democratic National Committee sent out a memo quoting Huntman’s statements on the Sunday talk shows. Huntsman’s presidential campaign is therefore functioning as a propaganda tool for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

Huntsman doesn’t represents any particular Republican faction. Rather, he represents a point in time — late 2008 through spring 2009 — when a lot of “smart” people in the GOP seemed to believe that the Obama ascendancy was more or less permanent. The way to succeed as a Republican in the Obama era, these people believed, was to cooperate in the patriotic spirit of Bipartisan Compromise.

You can run down the list of names of those who succumbed to this nonsense: Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist, Dede Scozzafava, Bob Bennett — and, while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and throw John Cornyn‘s name in there, too.

When Huntsman accepted an appointment from Obama as ambassador to China, the former Utah governor probably little suspected that the political tide would turn as soon as it did. He might have expected that he could return from Beijing in a couple of years and be welcomed by a GOP chastised by defeat. Instead, by the time he returned to seek the presidential nomination, the Republican Party had rolled to its biggest mid-term landslide in more than half a century.

Huntsman is the fossil remnant of a brief political epoch — the Age of the RINOsaurs, if you will — and is destined to the oblivion that all such creatures richly deserve.