Only in the Bizarro world of 2011, when the Republican Party is essentially the de facto Tea Party, can Jon Huntsman seem too liberal to be the party’s Presidential nominee. He’s ultra-conervative on social issues and has the type of sophisticated intelligence that could be attractive to Independents who’ve wearied of Obama. But because he believes in global warming and thought the debt ceiling shenanigans were ridiculous, he has essentially no shot at the nomination. You will accept the self-defeating ideology without question or else. An excerpt about Huntsman’s formative years at the American Conservative:

“Huntsman Jr. had a rebellious phase. He dropped out of high school to focus on his progressive-rock band, Wizard. Ask him about those days and he slips into semi-seriousness. He describes Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes, and Genesis as ‘highly impactful in terms of [his] view of the music world.’ And he jokes that the ’80s were a mostly ‘lost decade’ in terms of music when explaining his fondness for ’90s acts like the Foo Fighters and Ben Folds Five.

He eventually completed his GED and went to University of Utah; he also went on a two-year mission on behalf of the LDS church. Assigned to Taiwan, he quickly set to learning Standard Chinese Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkein. These years proved pivotal. He not only acquired the skills that would allow him to expand his father’s business in Asia, he also found himself an unofficial diplomat.

‘It was not just the effort to learn the language, the effort to learn the new highly structured system,’ he recalls, ‘I learned a lot about Asia, and I learned a lot about the United States.’ Huntsman arrived in Taiwan in the years following the Shanghai Communique, during which U.S. relations with mainland China began to normalize, a development that angered the Taiwanese.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)

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Prog rock, via Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe:

Dean discovers prog rock: