A great comparison/theory on Rick Perry. An incredible juggling act. And the photos of 9/11, over 10 years.

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Ross Douthat is a conservative columnist now with The New York Times. He’s always struck me as a fairly reasonable conservative; not a right-wing loon with no ability to see the other side.
Anyway, he’s a good writer, and he made an excellent analogy the other day that struck me as being really accurate. He wrote that Rick Perry is in many ways the Howard Dean 2004 of this GOP presidential race.
Because Perry, like Dean, whipped the extremes of his party into a frothy frenzy during primary season, but ultimately had so many fatal flaws that the majority of the party realized they were unelectable.
And that’s what I think is happening with Perry. Even the other GOP presidential candidates think he’s too extreme, and thankfully he’s being exposed for the bullying fraud that he really is.
Check out Douthat’s analysis here.

And, just for fun, let’s revisit this old treasure. Ahh, Howard, you enthusiastic bastard, you.

**Once again, the Boston Globe website photo project, The Big Picture, has blown me away. Amazing photojournalism here, folks.

Check out their photo gallery (one of the shots is above) of 10 years of progress at Ground Zero here.

**Finally, this juggling woman impressed me big-time. Watch how he uses his feet and his hands and doesn’t miss a beat. Definitely one skill I would love to have; I can’t imagine how much practice it takes to do something like this:

Obama’s disappointing troops withdrawal plan. A closed restaurant makes me sad. And incredible photos of the sun

Tennis fans: Check out my Wimbledon blog here, featuring a soon-to-be infamous clip of Dick Enberg accidentally saying something dirty. Also, I played my last tennis match as a Floridian Wednesday night; pulled out a tight 7-6, 6-4 win. Was it important to me that I leave on a triumph? You bet your ass it was.

So President Barack Obama went on television Wednesday night, and said that we would withdraw 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011, and that the rest of the 33,000 troops who went over there as part of the “surge” would be coming home by the end of next summer.

Great! Terrific! Fantastic! Except, you know, that means there will still be close to 70,000 troops in Afghanistan. They’ll be brought home, Obama said, sometime in 2014.
Which means by that point we’ll have been in Afghanistan for 12 years. TWELVE YEARS.
Sigh. This president has become a full-fledged war president, hasn’t he? Twelve years in Afghanistan, a place that has become the 21st century Vietnam.
Things ain’t changing over there. They’re not going to change no matter how many American troops are on the ground.
Once again, Barack Obama takes the slow, incremental approach. Once again, those of us who believe this war should end immediately are told to be patient, he’s doing the right thing, etc.
Wrong. Bring the damn troops home now. Enough is enough.

**So there’s a restaurant in Daytona Beach that I pass every day going to and from work.
It’s called Billy’s Tap Room, and in its heyday it was a pretty popular place. It was one of those pubs where regulars met to discuss their lives, have a few drinks, and eat some food.
Anyway, it went out of business last June, and people were sad, stories about it were written in the paper, the passing of a landmark, yada yada yada.
And yet, 12 months later, the sign for the place is still up. Every day, people are reminded that what used be a great place no longer exists.
Why is the sign still up? Who knows. Shouldn’t someone take it down? Probably. But it just makes me a little sad that people who loved the place have to constantly be reminded that it’s not there anymore.  It just lingers as a memory of better times.

**I think I’ve pimped the way-cool Boston Globe feature called The Big Picture before; they basically take an event, or series of events, and run some incredible, large photographs.
The latest installment is about the summer solstice, and other great photos of the sun setting since early June.
No. 7,  No. 23, and No. 26 are just breathtaking, but most of them are really beautiful.