Face Of The Day

Renxinchinphotosgetty

Eleven-year-old Chinese girl Ren Xin, who has an excrescent hand on her back, looks tearful prior to her surgery, at the Armed Police General Hospital on December 12, 2007 in Beijing, China. Ren Xin, who is from the heavily polluted Shanxi Province in northern China, suffers from Congenital Scoliosis and parasitic fetus. Surgeons were preparing to remove the hand today and will perform a scoliosis correction operation in three months time. According to reports, the number of Chinese babies born with birth defects such as cleft lip and palates, and extra fingers and toes, has increased by 6 per cent each year, and babies born with disabilities now accounting for up to 40 per cent since 2001 and there are concerns that this may be related to environmental pollution. By China Photos/Getty Images.

Mexico’s Britney and the Virgin

A reader writes:

"Lounge singer"?  You have no idea.

That is Lucero (formerly Lucerito), the Mexican Britney Spears. She began her career at age 10 as a character on the Mexican equivalent of the Mickey Mouse Club television program, and has released more than 60 recordings and acted in more than ten full-length films and soap operas. Like Madonna, she’s transformed her image from cutesy child celebrity to teen sex idol to interpreter of traditional Mariachi-style ballads like the one she sang on that YouTube clip.  She’s currently married to another Mexican celebrity, Mijares.

Imagine a grown-up, less racy Britney Spears performing a ballad in honor of the icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Mexico City basilica, and now you know what effect that video really has.

Huckabee’s Foreign Policy

In two words – winging it. Loved this:

At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy. This is like taking travel advice from Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but the governor seemed unaware of the incongruity. When I pressed him, he mentioned he had once ‘‘visited’’ with Richard Haass, the middle-of-the-road president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ross makes a useful distinction between being qualified for the presidency and being prepared for it. I guess if you put Gaffney in the Pentagon and Haass at State, you’d have a pretty good successor to the incoherence of the Bush administration. But hey, he’s a believer! What else do you want?

The War For The War

Almost a case-book study of mission-creep:

The trouble is that the war’s rationale has become circular — "success" means success at putting the military engagement on a sustainable basis. We’re fighting for the ability to keep on fighting. But sustaining that posture keeps making the United States and our position in the world as a whole weaker and weaker.

Hell In Des Moines

God, I’m glad I didn’t sit through that one. I gave myself a flu-pass. But here’s the potted blogreax: Wolcott:

The glossiest domino is Mitt Romney, of course, who does himself no favors by getting testily anal about how much time he’s being alloted, though he’s a portrait in deportment compared to Alan Keyes, who seems to have stored up a pissload of anger, resentment, and righteous petulance until the right camera opportunity came along for maximum martyred posturing.

Ambers:

Romney and Huckabee were like two cultivars of fine Iowa maize.

Best line – Thompson’s on the moderator:

I am not sure how these other candidates plan to defeat al-Qaeda when they can’t even take on Carolyn Washburn. The format of this debate was more of a joke than a Mike Huckabee foreign policy answer.

Oh, and breaking news: K-Lo thinks Romney won! No word yet on who Hewitt thought did best. You’ll just have to wait for that one.