"On Second Thought" for Aug. 27, 2012

• Last week, Mitt Romney denied his campaign would like to gut Medicare. President Barack Obama then denied charges his campaign would gut welfare reform. That’s the problem with candidates today: No guts.
• Augusta National Golf Club made huge strides this week. The previously all-male club decided to admit any woman, so long as she either has been a U.S. secretary of state or is a prominent financier.
• The restriction is understandable. You can’t let just anybody hit a little white ball with a stick.
• Intel has hired a team of computer hackers to protect modern automobiles from computer viruses. So far, the team recommends that if your car starts acting funny, you should stop, turn off the engine, get out, get back in and turn it on again.
• Do we really want Internet cars? Won’t it be frustrating to have your dashboard tell you to pull to curb while it downloads an important update that will require you to restart?
• And what if it decides what it really needs is to update the driver?
• Unfortunately for Rep. Todd Akin, when a politician is about to say something really stupid, the body doesn’t have a way to shut the whole thing down.
• Akin, who caused a storm of criticism over uninformed comments about rape and pregnancy, needs to learn that whenever your doctor tells you something, it’s best to get a second opinion.
• Otherwise, you could end up in the gaffe doghouse, with no one to talk to but Joe Biden.
• A hurricane is bearing down on Tampa, Fla., as the GOP Convention prepares to convene. This could be a problem. As some members of Congress apparently demonstrated recently in the Sea of Galilee, they don’t do too well in water.
• And speaking of hot water, Mitt Romney took flak last week for joking that “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.” He could deflect all this by arguing that he really was taking a dig at Rocky Anderson, that other candidate of uncertain origins.
• Speaking of Rocky, the former Salt Lake Mayor took it on the chin last week when he was beaten out of a spot on the California presidential ballot by Rosanne Barr. It’s kind of hard to know what to compare this to. The only thing that comes to mind is that it’s kind of like losing a national-anthem singing contest to, well, Rosanne Barr.