Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board thinks Rick Santorum’s economic ideas are unfair:

He’s the frugal guy, the man of faith, the person who understands the financial worries of average Americans. He’s directly contrasting his own blue-collar bona fides with those of the more privileged Mr. Romney.

Identity politics is often a winner, and Mr. Santorum does it well. If only he could stop at identifying with this audience, rather than feeling the need to give them special favors.

Huh? Translation: “If only he would pander insincerely to them instead of actually promising to do something for them and their situation.” More:

And so at the heart of the Santorum agenda are policies designed to give special handouts to the working class, simply because they are the working class—and even then only to segments of this group. That’s behind Mr. Santorum’s zero corporate tax on manufacturers, which benefits only Americans working in manufacturing. (Job at Wal-Mart? No soup for you!) It’s behind his plan to triple the child tax credit, which benefits only Americans fortunate enough to have a child. (Stalled love life? No soup for you, either!) Call it preferential populism.

Um, I could be wrong about this, but I seem to recall that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board generally having no problem with preferential elitism using tax policy — specifically, giving tax breaks — to the upper class simply because they are the investor class the upper class. Anyway, perhaps Santorum favors giving tax breaks to the working class because they have been very hard hit by the recession, and have lost massive ground compared to the upper classes in recent decades (see here and here). Perhaps Santorum wishes to use the tax code to incentivize manufacturing in America because he would like to see American people employed making stuff again, at a good wage, rather than employed selling stuff, at a depressed wage, that China manufactures. That Santorum truly is History’s Greatest Monster. And maybe, just maybe, Santorum understands that if we are going to have enough Americans to pay taxes to support the next generation, we are either going to have to import them via immigration, or grow them ourselves.

Ross Douthat is worth reading on this. See Ramesh Ponnuru too.

There’s nothing really to say except that the Alabama Crimson Tide deserve to be the national champions. They played like national champions tonight. I wonder how things might have gone different for the Tigers if they had had a quarterback. Well, hell, I had a great time at the party today at Antoine’s, so, hellwiddem.

UPDATE: Here at the Mothership, we are picking up a very great deal of angry chatter at Les Miles for sidelining Jarrett Lee the whole game, while letting the incompetent Jordan Jefferson remain on the field leading the Tigers to their worst offensive performance of the season. Les Miles owes Jarrett Lee an apology. He owes all Tiger fans one.

Word reaches the Mothership that a spirited band of pro-LSU chevaliers rented a parking lot somewhere in the Superdome’s vicinity for a massive tailgate party. They ordered 13 frozen daiquiri machines, fully loaded, to provide for the spiritual needs of the clientele. Trouble is, they discovered that half the machines were prepared to dispense strawberry daiquiris.

You see the problem, don’t you? Strawberry daiquiris are red — the color of the Alabama Crimson Tide.

This could not stand. Fortunately, someone had the bright idea to obtain a batch of blue food coloring to add to the mix. Result: purple daiquiris. Crisis averted.

Off to the Crescent City shortly. If the Lord is with us, we’ll be at the Old Absinthe House this morning before the last Bloody Marys have been drained. I’ll update the blog as I can today. Lunch at Antoine’s. It’ll be three hours long. Hoo boy. All together, Tiger Nation:

Hot boudin!

Cold coosh-coosh!

Come on, Tigers!

Poosh, poosh, poosh!

In Greece, the economic crisis is having an agrarian consequence:

As Greece’s blighted economy plunges further into the abyss, the couple are joining with an exodus of Greeks who are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation’s rich rural past as a guide to the future. They acknowledge that it is a peculiar undertaking, with more manual labor than they, as college graduates, ever imagined doing. But in a country starved by austerity even as it teeters on the brink of default, it seemed as good a gamble as any.

Mr. Gavalas and Ms. Tricha chose to move back to his native Chios, an Aegean island closer to Izmir, Turkey, than to Athens. They set up their boutique farm using $50,000 from their families’ life savings. That investment has yet to pay off; they will have their first harvest later this year. But the couple are confident about their decision.

“When I call my friends and relatives in Athens, they tell me there’s no hope, everything is going from bad to worse,” Ms. Tricha said on a recent afternoon, as she walked through her greenhouse, where thousands of snails lumbered along onrows of damp wooden boards. “So I think our choice was good.”

More:

At a troubled moment when the debt crisis has eroded the country’s recent economic gains — perhaps irrevocably — there is much debate about whether a return to the land or the sea is a step forward or backward.

Ms. Tricha knows where she stands. “My parents were from the countryside. They were farmers when they were young. I studied to avoid becoming a farmer. They were teachers. And then their daughter studied and then went back to being a farmer,” she said. Nevertheless, she added, “for me it’s like going forward, because I think we neglected the land.”

Yiannis Makridakis, 40, a Greek novelist whose work touches on themes of tradition and regionalism, represents a different strain of refugee, with a more political tinge. He said he moved from Athens to Chios in 2010 as an act of defiance against a global financial system he found unsustainable. He bought property with a well and grows his own vegetables.

“I came to the conclusion that I want to live this insignificant life of mine as one human being among others,” Mr. Makridakis said on a sunny afternoon, looking down from his balcony on the rooftops of his village, Volissos, and the blue sea below. “According to the old ways, where people work to secure their basic needs.”

An older woman interviewed there tells the times that all her children are college-educated, and live in the city. If they returned to their village, she would consider that all her efforts for them were “wasted.”

What an odd thing for a mother to say: that if her children returned to live in their ancestral village, she would consider herself a failure. Is this her failing — which is to say, a sign that modernity has corrupted her? Or is she wise, not foolishly romantic? You know what I think. What do you think?

The other night I met a physician at a social event, and we got to talking about childhood obesity. He said that it is becoming such a massive health issue now that it is redefining our medical norms. That is, obesity is on its way to becoming the new normal, from a medical point of view.

If that’s so, then we’ll be seeing a lot more stories like this one, about a teenager who underwent surgery to help her lose weight. Excerpt:

One percent to 2 percent of all weight-loss, or bariatric, operations are on patients under 21, but studies are under way to gauge the outcomes of surgery on children as young as 12.Allergan, the maker of the popular Lap-Band, a surgically inserted silicone band that constricts the stomach to make the patient feel full quickly, is seeking permission from the Food and Drug Administration to market it to patients as young as 14, four years younger than is now allowed. Hospitals across the country have opened bariatric centers for adolescents in recent years.

Doctors who are open to operating on younger patients note there is substantial evidence that dieting frequently fails.

“Most of us have witnessed the medical establishment provide the same advice over and over again to kids who are overweight — they just need to diet and play more outside,” said Dr. Thomas Inge, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati, who is participating in a National Institutes of Health study of weight-loss surgery on teenagers. “I wish it were that simple.”

Good thing our public health is so well-funded, and can handle paying for these surgeries to come.

Economist Simon Johnson says mainstream people ought to take Ron Paul more seriously, because he does have some smart things to say about our economic system. The problem with Paul, though, is his prescriptions are faulty:

Ending the Fed – even if that were possible or desirable – would not end the problem of Too Big To Fail banks.  There are still many ways in which they could be saved.

The only way to credibly threaten not to bail them out is to insist that even the largest bank is not big enough to bring down the financial system.

That’s Huntsman’s proposal. 

So, it’s official: my niece Hannah and I are going to Paris in April. This will be her first trip to the world’s most beautiful city, and to France; I am so lucky to be able to show her the Paris, and the France, that I love. It has been five years since I’ve seen Paris; Fred Gion, a Parisian who is one of this blog’s readers, was a terrific companion, though I’m sorry the little Perigord restaurant we passed such a good time in has since closed. Hannah decided to minor in French when she started college last autumn, in part because of the things I was able to show her and tell her about France, so it is truly an honor to be her guide this spring.

I have an idea of the things I want to show her — and I was encouraged to hear her say yesterday that yes, she wants to see some of the main sights, but mostly she wants to experience Parisian street life. That’s my favorite thing about any city. I’ve spent this evening looking for boutique hotels either on the Left Bank neighborhood, or in the Marais. Those are my favorite places to stay, because they’re so pleasant and so central, but maybe you have a better idea? Or a good recommendation in either neighborhood. I was eager to book a particular hotel I ran across in the Marais, L’Hostellerie du Marais, and was so pleasantly surprised to discover that it was the very same hotel my wife Julie and I stayed in when I took her to Paris for the first time (it was called the Hotel des Chevaliers then). I might well book that one, but I’m going to look a bit more. It’s so much cheaper, it seems, to book through Expedia, bundling a flight and a hotel.

What will we do in Paris? Aside from the main church-and-museum sights — Notre Dame, Ste-Chappelle, the Musee d’Orsay, the Musee Rodin — I want to visit some places for shopping and eating that are off the beaten tourist trail. Which are your favorite places? We will have to go to Berthillon and have ice cream, and maybe to Angelina for chocolat chaud. But where does a thoughtful uncle who is not made of euros take his niece to help her fall in love with Paris? Let’s crowdsource this one. Of course you know I will be taking you all along with us, blogging this trip, helping you to see Paris through the eyes of an 18-year-old American girl who just might find herself there.

Mrs. Dreher is deep inside her bubble in front of the TV. The new season of “Downton Abbey” has just started. Fanatic, she is. I bet a few of you like this show too. Open thread. Me, I’m cleaning the kitchen and purifying my spirit for tomorrow’s LSU-Bama game.

Via Andrew Sullivan, this Rick Santorum quote:

“I’d love him just as much as I did the second before he told me,” – Rick Santorum, on how he would react if one if his sons came out as gay.

I completely believe him. I would say the same thing, and mean it with all my heart. Not every father or mother could, or would, and not every gay son or daughter could, or would, accept that. But nothing could separate my children from my love. I tell them that all the time, because I want them to know it’s true.

The abstractions of the culture wars break down in actual families and in actual communities. I found out that in my small, very conservative and churchgoing Southern town, there’s a lot of affection for Ginger Snap, a local black drag queen. Ginger Snap has her own float in the community Christmas parade. I guarantee that if you polled the people along the parade route, both white and black, nine out of 10 would say that homosexuality is wrong and that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed. But they will also watch Ginger Snap roll by on her float and wave. Ginger Snap is Matthew, the kindly young maitre’d at a restaurant in town. He’s always polite, and kind to people’s children when they come in. The idea that holding a critical moral position on homosexuality obliges one to hate this young gay man would strike most people around here as strange. If you are the sort of person who demands that everyone around you adopt your own point of view before you will establish some sort of relationship with them, you will be unhappy and isolated, until and unless you can move to a city big enough to establish yourself in your own ghetto.

People are complicated. If you want logic to dictate social life, stay out of the South, and especially stay out of southern Louisiana. Our town really is a “love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart” kind of place, or so it seems to me. Anyway, there is no reason to think Santorum’s statement is hypocritical in the least. Verily, as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.