Newt Gingrich's resignation as Speaker

There was a column I saw today that took to task the writer of a Romney ad in Florida for coupling the ethics problems that Newt Gingrich had in the House of Representatives with a reference to Gingrich's resigning the Speakership in disgrace a couple of years later. The columnist pointed out that the occasion for Gingrich's resignation was not a development in the ethics problems, but rather, poor GOP showing in the elections for Congress. But even so, does not this make this a bad sign for Gingrich? The Republicans made a bad showing in an election that should have been their year — Bill Clinton was President, and in off-year elections, the President's party usually does badly. And Clinton was hardly a dream President — his ethical problems were legion. The fact is that Bill Clinton got reelected by campaigning, not against Bob Dole, his actual opponent, but against Gingrich. Do the Republicans want to nominate someone who is so unpopular that he can single-handedly lose them an election? I certainly hope not.

Will Florida decide it?

For a while, Newt Gingrich was leading in some of the Florida polls. But the most recent ones show Mitt Romney with a substantial lead. If Romney wins in Florida, many are saying that he has the nomination sewed up.

And, of course, anyone who is anybody in the GOP wants Romney to be the nominee. People like Bob Dole and John McCain, who were past nominees. People like Tim Pawlenty and Chris Christie, who might have been a lot of people's choices themselves. And George H. W. Bush, who has actually served in the White House. Also, almost nobody who served in the Congress when Gingrich was Speaker seems to want him — and a lot of them have come out for Romney. Among non-politicians, people like Ann Coulter have declared themselves — certainly not for Gingrich. So hopefully, Gingrich will, after Florida, realize his is a lost cause and fall in line behind Romney — as Romney fell in line behind John McCain when his cause was lost, four years ago.

Let us face it. The only thing that really matters is defeating Barack Obama in November. And clearly, Romney has the best chance in November — all polls show that. So let's get this business over with.

Noemie Emery, Chris Christie, and wishful thinking

Yesterday I opened my copy of the Washington Examiner to see a column by Noemie Emery entitled “Why they still pine for Christie.” I will not post the entire column here, but you can read it by following the link. And her main thrust is that Chris Christie would be a better nominee for the GOP than any of the current contenders.

Well, I'm not going to say anything negative about Christie here. Those of you who have read my earlier posts know I like him, and would happily support him — even in preference to Mitt Romney — if he chose to run. But he does not want to run for the Presidency this year!

So it is simply wishful thinking for Emery to build up Christie as the best candidate. The day is long past when a candidate could be nominated without seeking the nomination and getting delegates pledged to him elected by the primary voters. This could be done in 1940 for Wendell Willkie. It cannot in 2012. So, writing about how great a nominee Christie would be is a waste of effort. Sorry, Noemie Emery!

And another old corporate name dies: Goodbye, Eastman Kodak

And now, another long-famous corporate name has filed for bankruptcy. One far older than Borders, or Blockbuster, or Syms, or any of the other companies that have filed in the past few years. Sad to say, it seems that Eastman Kodak can no longer continue its existence and has filed. And while some people might say that Kodak was the equivalent of a buggy-whip company after the rise of the automobile, this really was not true. In fact, one of the few assets that Kodak brings to the bankruptcy proceedings to pay off its creditors is a collection of digital imaging patents that have substantial value.

So what did Kodak do wrong? For one thing, it did not, apparently, fully exploit those patents it had. Many of the Japanese camera makers, such as Nikon and Canon, seem to have made the transition to digital cameras work. (So did Fuji, whose background is in film, the other major product for which Kodak was known.) Was it poor management? Or the weak Obama economy? We will never, I fear, know for certain. But it's sad to see an old name like Eastman Kodak go.

After South Carolina, where do we stand?

It is clear that Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina primary — not a surprise that he won it, but really surprising that he won it so big. But there are special factors. Apparently, there was a debate just before the primary in which Mitt Romney didn't do very well, and South Carolina is a hotbed of Tea Party sentiment, and those factors both counted for a lot. Gingrich won't do as well in Florida, the next state, though. Mitt Romney is leading the polls there by more than 20 percentage points. And so the effect of this primary will only be to make things a bit more exciting, and less predictable. It is getting more and more a two-man race, but neither Rick Santorum nor Ron Pail is quitting, and that makes for a very complicated picture.

Things are moving fast and furious

Yesterday, two new developments occurred in the race for the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination. First, the Iowa results were recounted; it seems that Rick Santorum actually won by 34 votes (but this will yet change; eight precincts haven't been heard from), instead of Mitt Romney winning by 8. But this is not an actual vote that decides the Presidency (or even the nomination) the way a few votes gave Florida (and ultimately the White House) to George W. Bush in 2000. It's basically a tie, and Santorum and Romney will probably both get about the same number of delegates from Iowa that they would have gotten if the original result stood. All that means is that Santorum can now claim to have won Iowa — a state where he had campaigned hard for months, and which Romney had essentially ignored until two weeks before the caucuses. If Santorum points to this and minimizes Romney's win in New Hampshire (which he is doing now, on the grounds that Romney “almost lives there”), the real comparison is this. Romney won New Hampshire decisively, as he was expected to; Santorum, by contrast, got what was really a tie in Iowa, a state where Romney was given little chance.

The second development was Rick Perry's departure from the contest, endorsing Newt Gingrich. This probably means that Gingrich will win South Carolina today. But how keen will the “values voters,” who support Perry, be for a man who cheated on his first wife with the woman who then became his second, and then cheated on his second wife with the woman who then became his third? I think this stalls Romney's quest for the Presidency a bit, but it will resume.

And tomorrow it is South Carolina

Tomorrow, it is South Carolina's turn to hold its primary — one of the few cases in this country where any election, primary or general, is held on anything other than a Tuesday. The polls in the most recent days are mixed; they show Newt Gingrich ahead in some and Mitt Romney in others. (Rick Santorum, who was ahead of Gingrich just a short while ago, seems to be fading; the latest polls show him fighting Ron Paul for third place, a long way behind the top two.) The polls are so indecisive that it looks as though we will have to await the actual results tomorrow night or Sunday.

And this is closer to what I might have thought — Gingrich should be very popular in South Carolina, given that his political career was made in neighboring Georgia, and his Southern type of conservatism should resonate there. Of all the non-Romney candidates, he has the best qualifications — but yet, so much controversy surrounds him that I cannot see him winning in November; and, of course, the puropse of these primaries is to pick a nominee who has the best chance to win, against President Barack Obama, in November. So I still feel the party has to pick Mitt Romney.

Some people are using Romney's wealth as a reason not to support him. Surprisingly, nobody seems to think that John F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt could not do right by the “little man,” yet they cannot visualize Mitt Romney as understanding people who don't have a lot of money. I don't think that the fact that someone is rich should be held against him, but apparently some people do. But fortunately, this argument is coming out now, in January, so that President Obama cannot suddenly spring it in the heat of a general election campaign. It will, by the time of the conventions, be old hat.

So, as I said, now we need to wait till South Carolina's votes come in.

The Wikipedia strike

Anyone who wanted to look up something on Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia, yesterday, was out of luck. The powers-that-be had shut it down (and several other sites such as Reddit had done likewise, but Wikipedia is the most important of the bunch) as a protest against a couple of intellectual-property-rights bills being considered in the Congress. I have not looked closely enough at these bills to say how I feel about them — I suspect that I agree with the people who shut Wikipedia down on the substance of the bills, but I cannot be certain — but I think it was a sublimely silly thing to do.

Usually, a strike is an action by one party to exert pressure on another, where the second directly benefits by the activity of the first and is harmed by the first party's failure to perform. But in this case, the “second party” that they are trying to influence — Congress — can function very well without Wikipedia. They have their own research organization — the Library of Congress — which has direct access to a lot of the material which anyone might have gone to Wikipedia to look up. So shutting Wikipedia down for a day does little to advance their cause. In fact, the public that uses Wikipedia billions of times a month can only become angry at its not being there, and rather than petitioning Congress, they are more likely to turn against Wikipedia.

Several other Internet-related entities — in particular, Google and Yahoo! — have taken the more conventional step of lobbying Congress. And they appear to be — at least, to some extent — successful. Even before the Wikipedia shutdown, key Senators and Representatives had moved into opposition. Even Senator Ben Cardin (from my home state, Maryland), who had sponsored legislation of this type in the past, has moved into opposition.

So did they really need to shut Wikipedia down? I believe not.

Rick Santorum, gay marriage, love, and hate

Looking around the Web, I spotted this posting on a blog, with reference to candidate (and former Senator) Rick Santorum:

At a campaign stop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina today, a woman told Rick and Karen Santorum that she's trying to reconcile her support for him with the fact that her son is gay and he and his friends react poorly at the mention of Santorum's name because they think he hates gay people.

Replied Karen Santorum: “I think it's very sad what the gay activists have done out there. They've vilified him and it's so wrong. Rick does not hate anyone. He loves them. What he has simply said is marriage shouldn't happen. But as far as hating, it's very unfortunate that that has happened. And a lot of it is backyard bullying.”

Said Rick: “This is a public policy difference. And the problem is that some see that as a personal assault.”

He went on to reply that children deserve a mother and father and unless that is promoted there will be less of it, adding: “… There's all sorts of other relationships that people have, and they are valuable relationships — whether they are amorous relationships or friendship relationships or familial relationships — they're all important, they all have value they all should be affirmed. But that does not mean that we should change the laws to order — to create an atmosphere where children and families are not being promoted.”

Karen Santorum's saying “He loves them,” I suppose, is consistent with the Catholic Church's policy (and that of many other Christians, but I mention the Catholic Church because that is Santorum's religion) of "love the sinner, hate the sin." But I, for one, find it ridiculous. A person is the sum total of his beliefs and actions, nothing more, nothing less. I cannot love someone who does hateful things — at least fully; I can certainly love the person in those aspects that are not hateful to me. But in any case, to put myself in the position of those “gay activists” to which Karen Santorum referred, I would rather be hated, but left alone without interference, than loved, but prevented from doing something that I feel necessary to my life's fulfillment.

The position that “children deserve a mother and father and unless that is promoted there will be less of it” fails to consider what children without “a mother and father” would have instead. A child with two parents, even if both the same sex, is still better off than one with one, or even none, because they have been abandoned. Nobody is advocating that one (or both) parents of a child who has “a mother and father” should abandon that child, so what point is Santorum trying to make?

I strongly believe that laws should prevent something only if somebody would be harmed by the act they would prevent — and nobody has pointed out to me anybody who would be hurt by allowing two men, or two women, to assume the status of a married couple. So the only harm that anyone can argue is to God's order — if one assumes that marrying someone of the same sex is a sin. And violations of God's order should be left to God — not the State — to punish. The Catholic Church may believe homosexual activity is a sin; certainly there are religious communities that do not. (The Episcopal Church has chosen a homosexual bishop — though this has led to a split within the church.) In the spirit of the First Amendment, if something is considered wrong by one religious group, but not by another, the Government has no business banning it.

One more candidate drops out in favor of Mitt Romney

And now, the Republican field has narrowed again. As some other people who might have been candidates, but decided to stay out (namely, Tim Pawlenty and Chris Christie) have already done, Jon Huntsman has decided that the way to win this year is to unite behind Mitt Romney. And yesterday, he withdrew as a candidate.

As one of his aides told CNN,“Governor Huntsman did not want to stand in the way of the candidate best prepared to beat Barack Obama and turn our economy around. That's Mitt Romney.” Or in Huntsman's own words, as reported by Fox News, “Today, I am suspending my campaign for the presidency. I believe it is now time for our party to unite around the candidate best equipped to defeat Barack Obama. Despite our differences and the space between us on some of the issues, I believe that candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

Now, what is necessary is for the rest of the candidates to realize that this is so.

On Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is being celebrated as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. Now, I understand that the African-American community feels the need to commemorate one of their own, but I have to say that King is hardly one that I would want to honor with a national holiday. (And this doesn't make me a racist, though opponents of the King's birthday holiday seem to get automatically tagged as such.) While, in the early days of his adult life, he was a positive force for civil rights, he eventually ended up taking a position that I cannot call honorable: while he spent so much of his life trying to gain rights for his own fellow African-Americans, he stood in the way of this country's effort to gain freedom for people in Vietnam. Certainly not a person worth honoring.

I suppose that African-Americans should get to choose their hero, but wouldn't Thurgood Marshall have been a better choice? Marshall was the primary advocate for the side trying (successfully) to end segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and argued for civil rights in a number of other cases, and eventually ended up as the first African-American Supreme Court justice. I don't know when Martshall's birthday was, but I'd sooner make that a national holiday than King's.

And the polling continues

I have looked again at the Real Clear Politics polling data in South Carolina, the next state to have its primary. Mitt Romney is still holding on to a narrow lead, but second place is back in the hands of Newt Gingrich, who I might have thought more likely than Rick Santorum to carry the bulk of the anti-Romney sentiment. And the surprising strength of Ron Paul is continuing — he is now in a virtual tie with Santorum for third. (Though each has only about half Romney's support.) Meanwhile, Rick Perry is far back in the pack; with just over 5%, it looks likely that if these numbers hold up, he will follow Michele Bachmann's lead and fold up his campaign after the South Carolina primary.

Gingrich is someone who built his political career in the South — in fact, in Georgia, the state neighboring South Carolina — so he should get the “favorite son” vote that Romney got in New Hampshire. If the polls hold up, he will simply come in a fairly close second, unlike Romney's decisive win in New Hampshire. And this will solidify the Romney claim to the 2012 nomination.

And now... South Carolina

Mitt Romney has now won Iowa (barely) and New Hampshire (rather decisively). Now the scene shifts to South Carolina.

I would have thought South Carolina a bad place for the Romney candidacy. It's Southern and conservative, so it might be Perry or Gingrich country. But I just looked at the polls on the Real Clear Politics site, and all the polls listed there have Romney in first place — in one case, only by three points, but in another, by 18. And — surprise! — neither Perry nor Gingrich is in second place, but rather Rick Santorum — who, until Iowa, tended to be an ignored candidate. But he is a candidate strongly aligned with the Religious Right, which I suppose makes his cause resonate with a lot of South Carolinians.

If the polls hold up, and Romney comes in first even in South Carolina, nobody can stop his nomination. And that is a good sign. If Romney can win as decisively as this, he can devote his energies to the fight against Barack Obama, which is where they need to be directed. We need someone who can defear President Obama this November. And more and more, that “someone” is Mitt Romney.

And now, New Hampshire has spoken

New Hampshire has spoken — a lot more decisively than Iowa last week. Some people said that (because Mitt Romney had been a Governor of next-door Massachusetts, and had a residence in New Hampshire) if Romney won less than 40% in New Hampshire, it would not be a convincing victory: his percentage was just short of 40%, but that seems to have been close enough for the analysts, considering that second place went to Ron Paul with less than 30%. And since neither second-place Paul nor third-place Jon Huntsman is considered a major threat to the nomination, and people like Newt Gingrich (despite his endorsement by New Hampshire's most influential newspaper) could not even make 20%, this has to be considered a significant win for Romney.

What this means, of course, is that Republicans want someone who can run a credible campaign against Barack Obama, who will of course, as a sitting first-term President, get his own party's nomination. Even self-identified conservatives (and they form a majority of New Hampshire Republicans, according to polls) realize that a Romney, impure conservative that he is, will be better for conservative ideas in the White House than a far-left Obama, and this is governing their votes.

As Rick Santorum almost won Iowa by staking out there and campaigning in one state while the others traveled about, Jon Huntsman did the same in New Hampshire. And this got him, as I said earlier, third place, with a lot bigger share of the votes than he is likely to get in any other state. But New Hampshire has only a small number of delegates, and he will only get a fraction of those. So, though this is likely to be the high water mark of his campaign, I suspect that in a month or two, Huntsman will withdraw. Ron Paul, the second-place finisher, is likely to soldier on till the convention. He may actually be the second-place candidate on Convention Day. But no matter how devoted his supporters may be, they do not represent the bulk of Republican identifiers, and he has no chance at the nomination. And Paul and Huntsman are the only two (other than Romney) who can call the result in New Hampshire positive for them.

Rick Perry, of course, wrote off New Hampshire, so his low finish is not surprising. He is staking everything on South Carolina. And he might do well in that bastion of Southern conseervatism. But the November election will not be fought in places like South Carolina, and Republicans in general know that, which is why most of the party is going to fall in line behind Romney.

New Hampshire does not always pick the eventual nominee. And it tends to pick Massachusetts people even when, like Henry Cabot Lodge or Paul Tsongas, they have no chance at their party's nomination. But combined with Iowa, the results point to a Romney candidacy. And I am happy to support that candidacy.

And now, New Hampshire

Today, folks in New Hampshire are voting in the first primary of 2012. Like the Iowa caucus, if it has any effect it will only be to winnow the field down. Mitt Romney is expected to win, so even if he wins big, nobody will concede him the nomination; after all, they know him well in New Hampshire; he was Governor of next-door Massachusetts, and has a residence in New Hampshire. Rick Perry, who had decided to rethink his options after losing big in Iowa, decided not to try in New Hampshire. His appeal is to Southerners, not New Englanders, so he's putting his eggs in a basket called South Carolina, whose primary is later this month. But this may be the end of the line for Jon Huntsman. He did not bother to compete in Iowa, preferring to try in New Hampshire, which he perceived as more akin to his brand of politics. Unless he does well in New Hampshire, he'll probably give up.

Another person who will have to make a decision is Newt Gingrich. The most influential newspaper in the state endorsed him, but his star started to fall when he came out below Rick Santorum and Ron Paul in Iowa. Unless he does well in New Hampshire, I think he's out of it.

Unlike Iowa's caucus, New Hampshire has a real primary. It's very hard to vote in a caucus; you have to be at the right place at just the right time, but in a primary, you have hours to cast your vote. So New Hampshire, proportionately to population, should have a much bigger turnout. But it's still a very small state. It does not have a lot of people, so it will not have a lot of voters, and so it still cannot have a big effect on the result, except by convincing some candidates to drop out.

Well, let us see what happens. Tomorrow we will know.

President Obama's "recess appointment" trick

There are some provisions in our Constitution that made sense in 1787, when it was first written, but do not in today's world; yet, it is unlikely that there will ever be an amendment to change them, because there are no people around who feel it in their interest to change them. In particular, there are two provisions that made sense when, back in the eighteenth century, it took many days for a Congressman from Georgia to get to the capital and back home, so when Congress adjourned, it would adjourn for months, and could not easily be reconvened. Today, when even Hawaii is only a few hours away by jet flight, and anyone can be summoned back to Washington by a telephone call, neither of these two provisions really makes sense. The first of these two is the “pocket veto” provision, where a President who does not sign a bill in 10 days (actually, a little more, because Sundays are not counted in the time) normally lets it become law, but, if Congress has adjourned, so that he could not send it back with a veto message, it is deemed to be vetoed. (Today, if he really wanted to veto the bill, he could send a message to the Speaker of the House and the Vice-President, as President of the Senate, asking them to reconvene their chambers, and they could do so in a day or two!) The other one of these anachronistic provisions is the “recess appointment” provision, whereby, if the Senate has recessed, the President can make a temporary appointment without getting Senate approval. The appointment expires after the Senate reconvenes and adjourns for the session without considering it, but this could last over a year.

This “recess appointment” provision rarely makes much difference, but President Obama has chosen to abuse this power in order to skirt the Senate confirmation powers and appoint a consumer affairs chief and fill some vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board, the latter, not surprisingly, with people who will solidify labor unions' control over the board. He has claimed that the Senate was in recess, giving him the right to utilize this provision; some Senators maintain that this was not the case, and I have seen, in the Washington Examiner, columns pointing out that up to now, it has been understood that the Senate had to adjourn for at least three days to trigger this provision. I am sure that other columnists besides the Examiner's are making this claim; I just have not seen other papers discussing it. (The “three days” comes from another provision of the Constitution, that says that neither house can adjourn for more than three days without the other's consent.)

The only problem is, who can challenge the President here? Columnists say the Courts will find these appointments unconstitutional, but in the federal court system, you can only bring a suit if you have “standing,” and who would have standing to sue? These appointments will undoubtedly stand, though it sets a bad precedent. We will see Presidents, in the future, wait to make other appointments that they know could never survive a Senate vote until something they can claim is a Senate recess has occurred.

The Constitution really does not define what constitutes a “recess” for this purpose. And nobody, as I said, will have standing to challenge these appointments. So I have to concede that a case can be made that the President is constitutionally permitted to make the appointments. But it is clear that he was extremely unwise to do so. And one day they will come back to haunt the Democrats, when a Republican president does likewise.

2012: a repeat of 2008 with new characters?

On the Republican side (but not the Democratic side, where the presence of a sitting president makes things totally different), this year's nomination campaign seems like a repeat of what occurred four years ago, but with different characters playing the same roles.

This year's Mike Huckabee is Rick Santorum, the darling of the Religious Right (though Catholic, not Evangelical Protestant). Huckabee won Iowa, but faded when things went to states which were less dominated by the Religious Right; Santorum didn't quite win Iowa, but came pretty close, and will probably not so as well as Huckabee all around, but he's clearly fitting into the same role.

This year's Rudy Giuliani is Chris Christie, a candidate who would suit a lot of us (including me) very well, but who simply does not accord with enough of the Republican electorate to win the nomination. Giuliani actually tried to run, but after a few primaries bowed out and threw his support to John McCain, Christie saw the situation from the beginning and strongly backed Mitt Romney.

And as the previous paragraph hints, Mitt Romney is this year's John McCain. So much of the "conservative" part of the party does not consider him conservative enough, though he's about as conservative as the nation will vote for, in fact. McCain could have beaten Obama except that the economy took a dive just a few weeks before Election Day; he was leading in the polls, actually. But this year, the weaknesses in the economy will help the GOP, not the Democrats, because the sitting President is not George W. Bush, but Barack Obama.

McCain and Romney do not really like each other, but when Romney saw he could not get the nomination four years ago, he conceded to McCain; McCain has just rewarded Romney, in turn, by endorsing him for this year's nomination.

The only candidate from four years ago who has no corresponding one this year, interestingly, is Mitt Romney. Since he's playing John McCain's role this year, he obviously can't play himself!

But if this is really 2008 with new characters, clearly the nominee will be Mitt Romney — and perhaps this time our November will see the Republicans (with “change” on their side this time!) recapturing the White House. I certainly hope so.

We don't need to be Canada, or Belgium

Yesterday, my wife went down into the District of Columbia to straighten out some problems involving her unemployment insurance benefits, and I accompanied her at her request. (There had been some problems that could not be handled by phone or online, and she was advised to come in and take care of the situation in person.) After we found the correct office, we waited while a clerk there dealt with the two persons ahead of us, in Spanish, which was evidently a language she was fluent in. When it got to my wife, we went in and it was absolutely clear that she was somewhat short of fluent in English. There were a number of points in the discussion where my wife had difficulty in communicating some point to her; fortunately, perhaps because I have had somewhat more experience trying to communicate with people whose English was weak, I was able to facilitate the communication, and my wife, afterward, thanked me effusively for making things work so she got the benefits due her. (The problem was not the usual bureaucratic problem of someone who insists that if you don't follow the letter of the procedures, you're out of luck; this clerk genuinely seemed willing to help once we could get across the information we were trying to provide.)

But then I was surprised to hear my wife complain that an employee of the Government of the District of Columbia, a subdivision of the United States, ought to be able to work with clients in English. She didn't like the idea that she might have lost money she was entitled to just because she could not express herself in Spanish, making her feel like a foreigner in her own native country. I could hardly disagree with her. She was expressing opinions I have held for decades, but which she had tended to disagree with — she had, for example, not agreed with my support for the group, started by S. I. Hayakawa many decades ago, called “U. S. English,” which advocated making English our official language.

I guess it took exposure to the consequences of U. S. English's not accomplishing their program to make her see why we need to do something. Seeing what has gone on in countries like Belgium and Canada brought me to these beliefs, but it took the fear of loss of money she was entitled to to make her see the point.

Iowans have spoken, but what did they say?

The Iowa caucuses were held yesterday, and the results bore out the recent polls that pointed to Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul as the leaders. Between Romney and Santorum, the results were a near-tie: Romney's margin over Santorum, according to the results I saw on the Web, was only 8 out of over 60,000 that the two candidates got. And the top three candidates together got over 70% of the total, so it is likely that some of the others will drop out soon. (It has been reported that Rick Perry, for example, is going back home to Texas to consider his options.)

The biggest winner might be said to be Santorum, who was at the bottom of the pack a few weeks ago, and yet got almost as many votes as Romney did. But this is Iowa. Four years ago, Mike Huckabee won Iowa, getting nearly half the vote. Iowa is a state with a lot of right-wing evangelical Christians, who might be even more up for this one since Iowa became the first Midwestern state to legalize gay marriage. (And who more clearly symbolizes the anti-gay position than Rick Santorum, whose position so angered Dan Savage — see my previous posting)? So Santorum might have been expected to win Iowa; the fact that he only essentially tied Romney — after campaigning harder in Iowa than any other candidate, while Romney mostly ignored Iowa until very recently — really means that Santorum did not meet expectations. But it does mean that the evangelical religious Right has settled on him as their candidate. (And if anything makes me more hostile to him than any of the other contenders.)

Ron Paul has to be happy about his third-place finish, though some polls had him winning Iowa. But in fact, most of his support came from independents, not Republicans, and he will not be able to transfer this strong Iowa showing to the nationwide party.

So I think that the result of the Iowa caucuses points to Mitt Romney being the 2012 nominee. (One anti-Romney blog I read denigrates Romney as the 2012 McCain. Perhaps he is, and that, despite that guy's comment, is a good thing. Who, after all, did the GOP nominate in 2008?) And I'm not complaining.

Happy new year -- and get ready for the start of the election process!

Yesterday was New Year's Day — the start of the year 2012. And, as every year that is a multiple of four, the beginning of both a leap year and a Presidential election year in the United States. (Yes, 1900 was not, and 2100 will not be, a leap year. But I doubt that any of the people reading this blog was alive in 1900, and I suspect very few, if any, will live to see 2100.) And tomorrow, the first event that actually does something in the 2012 election process, the Iowa caucus, takes place. Up until now, there have been polls, but all they have done is recording opinions, and not actually affecting the result except in that other people have been relying on them to decide who they want to support.

I've seen polls saying that Mitt Romney will win in Iowa tomorrow, others saying Ron Paul will win, and yet others pointing to Rick Santorum — who was an also-ran so very recently. Obviously, Romney's supporters have the good of the Republican Party (and I think the nation!) in mind — only he, it would appear, can possibly defeat President Obama in November, and this is the real goal. Santorum's supporters are mostly “social conservatives” (who are taking down the Republican Party because of their stupid ideas) plus a few bigots who can't support a Mormon for the Presidency (and the less said about them, the better). These people started off backing Michele Bachmann, then switched, when her craziness came out, to Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and more recently Newt Gingrich. Each in turn showed their flaws, so now they turn to Rick Santorum, who comes off as a somewhat smarter and saner version of Bachmann, but so similar that gay-rights advocate and columnist Dan Savage decided to use his name to denote a certain unpleasant bodily exudation that I choose not to describe more fully here.

Santorum cannot win the Presidency, even if he wins in Iowa, and even if he does win Iowa, he probably will be unable to win the nomination, but then, most recent Iowa caucus winners have failed to win the nomination. So enough said about him. But what of Ron Paul? Well, as one out of 435 in the House of Representatives, I think he serves a useful purpose. He brings libertarian ideas to the American people. And that is a good thing. But he goes so far in his libertarianism as to make a caricature, and in the Presidency he would be a disaster. (Not to mention his anti-Semitism, about which I commented a few days ago)

So I'll be awaiting tomorrow's Iowa caucus results, of course, hoping that Romney wins. But since Iowa is not the final answer (as I said, Iowa winners do not usually go on to the nomination), I won't lose too much sleep if Santorum or Paul wins.

The mischief that open primaries bring

There are a number of “centrist” bloggers, such as Solomon Kleinsmith (whose blog I generally like), who believe that our political system would be improved by opening up primaries to non-members of the party involved. I've never agreed with this, and a column in today's Washington Examiner by Byron York, entitled “‘Mischief’ voters push Paul to front of GOP race” caught my eye, making it clear that my reasons are correct. Now I know that when I cite one of York's columns in this blog (as I did very recently), it is usually to disagree with an opinion of his. But this time, he is not so much expressing an opinion as reporting facts. And his facts give me cause for concern:

Ron Paul is surging in the Republican presidential race. Just not among Republicans.

The Texas congressman is leading some polls in Iowa and is in a tie for second in New Hampshire. A candidacy once dismissed as sideshow is now being taken very seriously; the front page of Monday's Des Moines Register featured a huge spread under the headline “COULD RON PAUL WIN?”

Given Paul's views on the Fed, the gold standard and social issues, not to mention his isolationist foreign policy, the polls have left some politicos wondering whether Republican voters have somehow swerved off the rails. But there's another question that should be asked first: Who are Ron Paul's supporters? Are they, in fact, Republicans?

In an analysis accompanying his most recent survey in Iowa, pollster Scott Rasmussen noted, “Romney leads, with Gingrich in second, among those who consider themselves Republicans. Paul has a wide lead among non-Republicans who are likely to participate in the caucus.”

The same is true in New Hampshire. A poll released Monday by the Boston Globe and the University of New Hampshire shows Paul leading among Democrats and independents who plan to vote in the January 10 primary. But among Republicans, Paul is a distant third -- 33 points behind leader Mitt Romney.

In South Carolina, “Paul's support is higher among those who usually don't vote in GOP primary elections,” notes David Woodard, who runs the Palmetto Poll at Clemson University.

In a hotly-contested Republican race, it appears that only about half of Paul's supporters are Republicans. In Iowa, according to Rasmussen, just 51 percent of Paul supporters consider themselves Republicans. In New Hampshire, the number is 56 percent, according to Andrew Smith, head of the University of New Hampshire poll.

The same New Hampshire survey found that 87 percent of the people who support Romney consider themselves Republicans. For Newt Gingrich, it's 85 percent.

So who is supporting Paul? In New Hampshire, Paul is the choice of just 13 percent of Republicans, according to the new poll, while he is the favorite of 36 percent of independents and 26 percent of Democrats who intend to vote in the primary. Paul leads in both non-Republican categories.

”Paul is doing the best job of getting those people who aren't really Republicans but say they're going to vote in the Republican primary,” explains Smith. Among that group are libertarians, dissatisfied independents and Democrats who are “trying to throw a monkey wrench in the campaign by voting for someone who is more philosophically extreme,” says Smith.

Paul tops the field when pollsters ask Republicans which candidate they are certain not to support. “When you ask people which candidate they are least likely to vote for, Ron Paul is pretty high, because most Republicans here really don't want to vote for him,” says Smith. “His support is not coming, by and large, from Republican voters.”

What's true in New Hampshire is also the case in South Carolina, where Paul is 28 points behind Gingrich in the most recent Palmetto Poll. “The economic positions of libertarians are popular here, but Paul's positions on gay marriage, abortion, illegal immigration, and national defense are all antithetical to South Carolina's conservative culture,” says Woodard. “About 13 percent of the GOP primary electorate are military veterans, and they don't want to bring everyone home. We have a strong pro-life network, and it is knit into the Republican Party at its roots, and the amendment declaring marriage to be something between a man and a woman won with over 70 percent of the vote in South Carolina.”

Non-Republicans are sure to vote in all three early GOP contests. Iowa requires that caucus participants be registered Republicans, but anyone can show up on caucus night, register, and vote. In New Hampshire, so-called “undeclared” voters of any stripe can participate in the GOP primary. And South Carolina's GOP contest is open to all. Wherever Paul's final total, it will reflect lots of non-Republican votes.

Of course, next November's general election is open, too, and the Republican nominee will needs significant non-GOP support. But if Paul were the nominee, he would likely lose lots of Republicans, along with independents, and all of the Democrats who cast mischief votes on his behalf. Even his own supporters don't view him as having the best chance to beat Barack Obama.

There will be a lot written in coming weeks about Paul's role in the Republican Party. It's important to remember that a large part of his support isn't coming from Republicans.

This shows what can happen with open primaries or caucuses. And that's why I favor the kind of closed primaries we have in my current state of residence, Maryland and had in the state I grew up in, New York.

And now, I suppose, the Iowa home stretch

Though Christmas is a “nothing” event to me, I suppose that to the majority of Iowa voters it is. So between now and the caucus day (just over a week away!) the candidates will probably be working hard to convince last-minute deciders in Iowa to choose them — since they have finished concentrating on getting ready for Christmas. It's going to be a concentrated campaign for all of them.

A couple of days ago, Byron York wrote a column in the Examiner blaming Florida for this crazy schedule. Florida moved its primary up to the end of January, so Iowa and New Hampshire had to move theirs up even earlier to be sure they were first. I disagree with Byron York. Who says that Iowa has a right to be the first state to vote on a nominee? Or that New Hampshire has the right to have the first primary? If they weren't so insistent on being first, Florida could move their primary up and Iowa and New Hampshire would just stay at the dates they'd originally chosen. No, don't blame Florida — the real culprits are the people in Iowa and New Hampshire that refuse to let anyone hold a primary before their choices are made.

Obama is good at one thing: propaganda

You have to hand it to President Obama. He managed to convince enough people that the Republicans (or at least the ones in the House of Representatives) were opposed to keeping down the Social Security payroll tax deduction, despite the facts — that the Democrats were insisting on a two-month extension of the tax reduction, while the House Republicans were pushing to extend the cuts for a whole year. Such is the Obama/Reid/Pelosi propaganda machine.

In the end, of course, the House Republicans had to cave: it was two months or no extension at all, and the Democrats had the upper hand. But I find it amazing that the public fell for this. The majority of the people seemed to accept President Obama's characterization of the Republicans. It just goes to show how good his propaganda machine is. I just hope that the people can be led to see through this propaganda haze next year, and reject the Obama administration and replace it with someone like Mitt Romney, who might be able to fix what's wrong with the economy.

Even good guys can do bad things

The motto “Don't Be Evil” of Google is well known. And in general, I think that Google is a good company. I use their Gmail mail service, and I'm impressed with their excellent spam-filtering and I enjoy the fact that since they introduced large amounts of storage, others, like Yahoo!, have had to follow suit. But even good guys like Google can do bad things.

Recently, the fellows at Google seem to have decided that they want Gmail to look better, and they upgraded their interface. The new version does not work with older versions of the web browsers people use to access the Internet. I suppose that the folks at Google figured that the newest versions of most major browsers are free, so there is no barrier to installing them. What they did not allow for is that not everyone uses their own computer to access Gmail.

Most of the time, I read Gmail on my own computer, which has on it the latest version of Internet Explorer. (I will not get into the discussion as to the merits of IE versus other browsers like Firefox, Chrome, etc. I have IE on my machine as my only browser because I've gotten used to it, and none of the alternatives is enough better for me to bother downloading it and learning to live with its quirks — and no piece of software is without its quirks that anyone needs to learn about.) But there are times when I will want to read my e-mail on a computer that is not mine — at a public library, for example. And in my county, the libraries are hurting for money. Many branches only open their doors, on some days, at 1:00 PM, and all branches have shorter hours than they did a couple of years ago. They just don't have the money to pay someone to install the latest versions of software such as IE, especially since most sites work just fine with the version they have. Some people have to use library computers as a matter of necessity, as they can't afford their own. In either case, whether it's just because I don't want to wait till I get home to read my e-mail or because someone has no alternative, I think cutting them off from the ability to access the latest version of the mail system is not a good thing. And this is why I have a bone to pick with Google.

Cal Thomas and Christopher Hitchens' death

Yesterday there appeared a column in the Washington Examiner by Cal Thomas, on the death of Christopher Hitchens. The first words in this column were “Perhaps not since Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Carl Sagan has there been such an ‘evangelical’ atheist as Christopher Hitchens, the writer and social commentator who died last week after a long and public battle with esophageal cancer.” I suppose Thomas has not heard of Richard Dawkins, certainly at least as ‘evangelical’ an atheist as Hitchens. But the bigger problem I have with Thomas' column is that he seems to be trying to convince Hitchens, who is obviously incapable of reading Thomas' column.

It might make sense for Thomas to explain his beliefs, and why he holds them. Bur when he quotes Biblical passages as if they are likely to convince the atheists among us, he seems to be totally unaware of the unlikeliness that they will do so. For his column to contain statements like:

To object to God is to create morality from a Gallup Poll. In Gallup We Trust doesn't have the same authority.

Hitchens was a gifted writer, but who gave him the gift? Why was he not a gifted actor, surgeon or athlete? Why was he not talentless? Was it an evolutionary accident, which would mean his gift and his life were meaningless and merely a “chasing after the wind”? (See Ecclesiastes.) Apparently he thought so.

An atheist will tell you he doesn't need God in order to be good, or perform good works. Maybe not, but the very notion of “good” must have both a definition and a definer. “Only God is good,” said Jesus. (Mark 10:18)

clearly assumes that quotes from the Bible alone will convince someone. But an atheist like Hitchens clearly considers the Bible to be simply the work of men, with no more authority than “Das Kapital” or any other propaganda piece.

Now I write this as a believer in God, who however (as a Jew) rejects the Divine origin of such works as the Book of Mark, which Thomas quotes. (Ecclesiastes, of course, is a different story.) But I certainly cannot see a thing that Thomas says in his whole column that is likely to change the view of a convinced atheist. I am certain that Hitchens would maintain that his talent was “an evolutionary accident.”

No, I think that the world shows the hand of a Divine Guide. But I also believe that it is impossible, by any means I can imagine, to change the mind of someone who believes otherwise. So I will explain my beliefs, and my reasons for holding them, to anyone who inquires. But I cannot condemn those who come up with different ones, based on what they see in this world. And I think Cal Thomas is totally wrong to say what he does about Hitchens.

Another person realizes Romney is our best hope.

Tom Bowler writes a blog called “Libertarian Leanings,” in which he describes himself as “a New Hampshire Republican with decidedly libertarian leanings.” As one might guess, many of his posts strike a responsive chord with this “Maryland Republican with decidedly libertarian leanings” (though not all). And particularly, Tom Bowler's blog post, dated December 15^th, entitled “Another ‘Not Romney’ Begins To Fade” is worth reprinting — at least this part:

I think what we've been witnessing over the last several months — what with a new front runner every few weeks — is the hope in Republican hearts for more substantial reform succumbing to the dread that Barack Obama will be re-elected. Each “not Romney” front runner stokes the fires of our hope. But then there is the fatal gaffe or a past indiscretion comes to light and fear takes over. Fear that we won't be able to stop Obama from dragging America into stagnation and mediocrity. Fear that the American way of life will be crushed under the weight of an ever more intrusive federal government, a government whose resources are devoted more and more to insulating the governing class from the voters who put them in office.

I'm settling in behind Mitt. This is no time for Republican or Libertarian purity and no time for tossing away the good in a futile quest for the perfect. Mitt Romney isn't perfect, but he will be very good for America. But most important, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid must be stopped.

This is an important point. Perfection is not the goal. Getting someone in the White House that will take us in a different direction from the one charted by President Obama is. Like Tom Bowler, I am certain that that “someone” is Mitt Romney.

Anti-Semites: Ron Paul, and Pat Buchanan -- does the GOP want their kind?

The Washington Examiner has formally endorsed Mitt Romney, but clearly some of its columnists have different ideas. Today I saw a column by Timothy P. Carney, a columnist who has a twice-weekly column in that paper, and who seems to be favoring Ron Paul. Carney refers to Paul as “[t]he principled, antiwar, Constitution-obeying, Fed-hating, libertarian Republican congressman from Texas,” and while his libertarianism has much to recommend him (though it goes to a far-too-extreme degree, by my standards), there is one particular aspect of Ron Paul that Carney seems to deny: Ron Paul's anti-Semitism.

Of course, in that same column, Carney seems to deny that Pat Buchanan was anti-Semitic. And Buchanan has made some statements that cannot be construed any other way. For example,

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats' idea of diversity?

But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.

And there is quite a number of other quotes by Pat Buchanan that can be found, such as (in 1990):

After denouncing a group of commentators with Jewish names, including Abe Rosenthal, Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger, Buchanan wrote: “If it comes to war, it will not be the civilized world humping up that bloody road to Baghdad, it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown."

And, (in 2007):

“If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where the real power is at…"

If Buchanan is not an anti-Semite, Hitler was a rabbi! But we are really talking about Ron Paul. And it doesn't take much digging to find quotes by him that demonstrate his anti-Semitism. In fact, the same Examiner that featured Carney's column recently carried a column by Philip Klein, with such notes as:

Nearly three years ago, Israel launched a counterattack on Palestinian terrorists in Gaza who had been firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians. In early January 2009, Paul released a web video in which he charged that Israel was launching a “pre-emptive war,” that Palestinians were living in a “concentration camp” and that they merely had “a few small missiles.”

He then repeated this claim on Press TV — the state-owned propaganda channel of Iran's Islamist government. “To me, I look at it like a concentration camp, and people are making homemade bombs,” he said of the situation in Gaza, adding sarcastically, “like they're they aggressors?”

Not only did Paul inaccurately portray Israel as the aggressor, and ignore the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks, but he also played into the global propaganda campaign to delegitimize Israel. Israel's enemies think that Jews have exploited global sympathy for the Holocaust, so they routinely liken Israelis to Nazis with phrases like “concentration camp.” That isn't an isolated instance of Paul employing the term. He also used it in 2010, when the Israeli navy blocked a flotilla funded by a group with terrorist ties as it attempted to break the blockade of Gaza — a blockade designed to prevent weapons from reaching Gaza terrorists. Nine of the “activists” aboard one ship were killed in the act of attacking the Israeli commandos who intercepted them — an event well documented on video. In response, Paul again condemned Israel, reiterating his claim that Palestinians were living in “concentration camps” in Gaza.

One can accept Paul's desire to avoid foreign wars as a product of his desire to reduce the role of government in general. But his desire in particular to avoid wars in support of Israel is not just that. It is clearly a sign of an underlying anti-Semitism.

An endorsement that makes sense

I don't always agree with the positions taken by The Washington Examiner, and many of my posts on here have documented my disagreements, but I was very happy to see yesterday's paper, with a headline proclaiming their strong endorsement of Mitt Romney's bid for the GOP presidential nomination, and, on page 2, the whole page taken up with an editorial explaining their reasons for their support.

Their primary reason, of course, is my own as well. It is simply that Romney has the best chance to beat Barack Obama in the election next November. And whatever the flaws that Romney has (and in enumerating these, the Examiner and I certainly differ: some things they consider bad, I'd favor, and vice versa), they cannot compare to the flaws of our sitting President. The Examiner's editorial states that:

…our country simply cannot afford four more years of Obama's record-setting deficits, willy-nilly spending and soaring national debt. His re-election would mean continuing the policies that have brought economic stagnation and high unemployment, and putting federal bureaucrats between Americans and their doctors under Obamacare.

So on this point, the Examiner and I certainly concur, and just because of this need to replace the man in the White House, we must all pull together for Mitt Romney's nomination.

A tale of two predatory companies: Please excuse the rant, but I need to vent

For this post, I guess I should apologize to those of my readers who read this blog with the expectation that I'll be discussing “important” things like the 2012 Presidential campaign. For once, I'm mostly venting about my own frustrations. It just seems that once upon a time, retailers took pride in the things they sold, and manufacturers took pride in the things they made, but those days are gone forever, and people like me have to suffer.

The two culprits in this story are a retail chain called FYE (For Your Entertainment) and a manufacturing company called Digital Products International (DPI, Inc.) making MP3 players (and other devices) under the brand name of GPX. The story actually begins a couple of years ago when I bought an MP3 player from FYE — not a GPX device, but someone else's — and got burned in the racket called “mail-in rebates.” (I wish those would be made illegal — but that won't happen. I sent in the coupon, and in due course got a check for $5. Since that was too small an amount to make a special trip to the bank to deposit, I put it aside, and only discovered it again months later — after it had become stale, so I was simply out the $5. I'm sure the company made lots of money from people like me that never got around to cashing or depositing those rebate checks!) But the MP3 player was a nice thing to have, and when I misplaced it I wanted to get another, so I went to FYE again. (Actually, a different FYE store; the one I had bought the first MP3 player from had closed.) I saw one there, marked down from $19.99 to $12.99 (no “mail-in rebate”! Just marked down, so I was sure to get the reduction.) that actually had a couple of features that made it better for me than the old one, so even if I found the old one, this one would still be worth having. I bought it, and at first I found it seemed to work OK, so there was no reason to hold on to the receipt — as it turned out, a big mistake!

After a couple of days, however, some things weren't working quite right. I couldn't put the device into “random” mode, so I wrote an e-mail to DPI to find out if I'd read the instruction sheet wrong, but this I could live with. But then the machine locked up; it wouldn't play past a particular song, and when it got to that point, I couldn't even turn it off — except by opening it up and taking out the battery! So I wrote another e-mail to DPI.

As it happened, the second one was the first one that got answered. The guy at customer service wrote me a nice friendly note, advising me to reformat the device, and even reminded me to copy the data to a backup so I didn't lose the files. I thought I was dealing with a good company in terms of having professional customer service people, but after following his instructions and reformatting the device, it turned out that it still locked up, only at a different song. So I wrote yet another e-mail. And this one was not answered, so two weeks later I wrote my fourth e-mail (the third on this particular problem — remember that my very first e-mail, about putting the device into “random” mode, hadn't yet been answered!) reminding them of my problem. I got back an e-mail, suggesting I call the company up and saying that this way we could get to the bottom of the problem. Well, as I've said before, I don't like using the telephone, but he gave me a free 800-number, so I made the call, and got to speak to two people — the one who originally answered the call and, as it turned out, the man who had sent me the e-mails — and it was decided that the particular MP3 player I had was defective, so I was advised to return it to the store where I got it for an exchange. I said I no longer had the receipt, so they might not replace it, and they said, “You have a 30-day warranty. They will replace it.”

So off I went, the next time I was in the shopping mall that had that FYE store, to that store, only to be told that without the receipt they could not do a thing. The store manager called another manager, who verified that she could not even give me store credit. Finally she called a general manager, who said that she could replace the device, but only if they had another of the same model in the store. Guess what! They'd sold them all, so there wasn't a single one. So I was out the $13 plus tax, with no recompense! I threw the MP3 player and all the packaging material on the counter, told them they could dispose of it anyway they chose, and left.

Last night, I finally got an e-mail from DPI responding to my first e-mail. Interestingly, the solution was the same as the earlier one: reformat the device. I responded that by this point, this advice was useless. I no longer had the device, and explained what had happened, and told the responder that I would never buy another DPI product again!

I'm still out the money, of course. And I'm no closer to having an MP3 player than I was three and a half weeks ago. But all I can do is make this posting, to warn my readers about predatory companies I've dealt with, so you can avoid them.

Newt Gingrich - my evaluation

Since Newt Gingrich is now leading some polls on the GOP nomination race, I think he deserves a longer discussion of what I believe is good and what I believe is bad about him.

One of the things that puzzles me is that many of the people who have problems with Mitt Romney because he changed his mind on so many things have flocked to Gingrich's cause. One thing that cannot be denied about Newt Gingrich is that his own reversals on the issues have been as big as Romney's. (Actually, although I have frequently remarked that nobody's religion should be held against him, I might be faulted for pointing out that Gingrich is a fairly recent convert to Catholicism. But it points out another inconsistency in Newt Gingrich's thoughts. In 2008, Gingrich decided that he wanted to be a Roman Catholic, being officially received into that church in 2009.) I cannot imagine anyone, after reaching his sixties, to decide that the religion he has believed in all his life was wrong and that he belonged in a different one. (Actually, this is his second change — in college he converted from Lutheranism to the Baptist church. Now frankly I find Roman Catholicism an extremely unappealing religion — anyone who can accept that one person is infallible on matters of faith, surrendering his own judgment to that of one man in Rome — or anywhere else — seems to me to be denying his own ability to think straight. But I am not holding his Catholicism against him; it is that, after attaining an age of over 65, he suddenly decided to change his religion.)

Of course, it surprises me that “family-values conservatives” would prefer a twice-divorced, three-times-married man over a man like Romney who has been married to one woman for all his adult life — over 40 years — but this is not really something that matters to me, although I don't see why it doesn't matter to people who keep proclaiming the importance of the family.

My biggest gripe with Gingrich is that — while, on some issues, like the Middle East, I agree with him — he seems to be advocating some strange, even unconstitutional, ideas on other issues, like changing the terms of federal judges so as no longer to be lifetime. (Note: while I firmly agree with Gingrich's position on the Middle East, in a discussion I had with my wife yesterday, she said her position would make her less likely to vote for him — she believes a president who is so firmly on one side of the issue cannot serve as a broker between the two sides. I concede that, but I feel that no American President or anyone else, can achieve peace in the Middle East at this time — the parties are so far apart that compromise seems impossible.)

I do need to say that, if next November I find myself in a voting booth with the names of Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama in front of me, I would have no qualms about voting for Gingrich. Obama's presidency has been so bad that I cannot imagine Gingrich being any worse. In this, Gingrich differs from such as Michele Bachmann, who could not get my vote — not that I would vote for Obama, but Bachmann on the ballot would drive me to vote for a third-party candidate in protest.

Newt has it right in one place, the Middle East

Well, I have to say one thing good anout Newt Gingrich: he has the facts right on the Middle East. A posting by Muriel Kane says:

In an interview with The Jewish Channel released on Friday, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich called the Palestinians an “invented” people and suggested they have no right to a state of their own.

“I believe that the Jewish people have a right to a state,” Gingrich told the interviewer. “Remember, there was no Palestine existing as a state. Part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs … and they had a chance to go many places. And for a variety of political reasons, we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s.”

Reuters points out that Gingrich’s remarks run counter to official United States policy, which does view the Palestinians as a people with the right to a state of their own.

Gingrich, who said his worldview was “pretty close” to that of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also described the Obama administration’s Middle East diplomacy as “out of touch with reality.” He inisted that Obama and his aides “lie to themselves” about the conflict, which he portrayed as one “between a civilian democracy that obeys the rule of law and a group of terrorists that are firing missiles every day.”

I don't like a lot of what Newt Gingrich has been saying, but on this issue, I agree completely.

One person's take on the GOP nomination prospects

My wife is nominally a Democrat. In fact, she's better described as an independent, though she is enrolled in the Democratic Party, and rarely votes in Democratic primaries. She is significantly to my left, though well to the right of much of the Democratic Party; she voted for McCain in the most recent election. (Though she considered him somewhat too right-wing, she considered Obama too left-wing, and mostly made the decision based on character. She'd found out about Obama's early history, especially the business about Alice Palmer, and she remembered that in the Dole-Clinton election, she thought Dole too right-wing, voted for Clinton, and was sorry about her decision.) At one point, because the economy soured, she had considered Obama's “change” agenda somewhat attractive, and considered voting for him, but character won out in the end. But her attitude has always been more generous toward Obama's attempts to fix the economy than my own attitude. (For more about her, see my earlier post dated November 7.)

She had been employed by Borders for 12½ years, and they closed her particular store in April; since then, she's been looking unsuccessfully for a new job. Finally, last week, she got a “yes”— from Target, for a part-time seasonal job. This week she started, and celebrated, by having a little fancier dinner than she normally considered affordable. And afterward she authorized me to quote her in this blog: “It's a sign how bad this economy is, when getting a part-time seasonal job is cause for celebration.”

She is probably willing to vote for Mitt Romney, if he is the Republican nominee. She is somewhat less likely to vote for Newt Gingrich, though she's looking more favorably at him than she had been. None of the other GOP candidates is likely to get her vote against Obama.

It's people like that that the GOP needs to win next year. One more reason I think Mitt Romney is the only nominee the GOP can choose, if they want any chance at taking over the White House.

What planet is she on?

In yesterday's Washington Examiner I read a column by Janine Turner that blew my mind. She wrote

Warning: I am going to write something radical.

Merry Christmas.

There I did it.

During the holiday season whether I am at work, at school, at a mall or the grocery store, I am reduced to feeling like a zealot when I utter those two words. As I scurry out the door, I have to resist the impulse to hide like a prairie dog before I am caught by the holiday Political Correctness police.

Though, who needs the police? The look of fear in the eyes of the clerks and other patrons speaks volumes. It's as if at any moment the emergency alarm will be pulled and pandemonium will ensue.

Like a siren in a nuclear power plant, I am exposed. I am a traitor to the New American Way. What is the New American Way? Intimidation. Conformity. Muzzling of free speech. Denial of religion.

As I journey home and put up a Christmas tree, my traditional warm and fuzzy religious experience is disturbed by an annoying angst that a Christmas tree is offensive. If I am a comrade to the cause and following the New American Way, my Christmas tree will now be a "Holiday tree."

As I stand back and admire the twinkling lights, I experience a nagging guilt that I am somehow a religious extremist.

Christmas is under attack. Christians are being silenced by the code of Saul Alinsky, an insidious intimidation creates a new pattern of thought, like a river creates a canyon.

Liberals have perverted the First Amendment to meet their agenda denying others the true intent of its meaning. It's no wonder that they consider the Constitution an ugly word. The Constitution holds them accountable. The New American Way works only by denying it or distorting it.

The First Amendment restricts the government from mandating a religion but it also guarantees the free exercise of religion, not to mention, freedom of speech. Does this only apply to atheistic liberals?

Christians are being denied freedoms to experience Christmas. This is the black and white of the issue.

If children are caught mentioning Christmas in school, they become outcasts, a disturbance, an obstacle to the New American Way. Children who are Christians are being shamed into submission.

Yet, the liberal elite has it all wrong. We are not a country of clones. We are a country of individualism and independence and uniqueness.

Is this not the true intent of the First Amendment? The liberal elite is getting away with blatant attacks on individual freedoms.

The irony is that the liberals pride themselves on their right to provocative uses of freedom such as immersing a cross in urine. Yet Christians can't say, "Merry Christmas" and children can't hand out Christmas cards in school.

All children of all faiths should be allowed to exchange greeting cards that honor their religion. It is the restriction of this freedom, or the mandating of one religion over another, that is wrong.

Things are frighteningly askew in American culture. This has occurred because by nature conservatives are reserved, respectful. Meanwhile, the loud, liberal and loquacious Left have dominated the dialogue.

Christians, and anyone else who holds religious freedom sacred, need to step up to the Christmas tree this year and embrace it for what it is: an expression of the Christian religion. This act does not deny other religions. It merely is an expression of one of many. Should we not be tolerant and respectful of all religions in America?

Christians, or any religion, should not be denied this right anywhere - in the workplace, in the school, in the mall, in the town square.

As Christians uphold their constitutional rights, they also honor other religions. It is our distinguishing quality that make us America. It is our acceptance of these that makes us Americans.

Merry Christmas.

When I read it I thought, “What planet is she on? She can't wish people ‘Merry Christmas’?” I can't get away from Christmas stuff. Yesterday I went into Barnes and Noble and the overhead speakers were playing “Oh come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord.” Who is preventing her from doing Christmas things — while I want to have them put out of my life completely, and I can't avoid them? Really!

Romney's Mormonism

Sunday, I was in a Panera or Starbucks (I forget which) having a tea and pastry, and talking to a young student who was becoming interested in politics after having been mostly indifferent. He'd asked me my opinions, and I was explaining that I really wanted to replace President Obama with someone like Mitt Romney, and when he asked why, I started to give my reasons — beginning with the fact that Obama has shown no leadership (allowing Congress to write the health care law, for example) while Romney showed that he could even get his proposals through, even when he had to work with a Massachusetts legislature heavily dominated by the opposite party. The student listened to me and agreed that this was an important point, and a nearby woman interrupted to say, “You know, I totally disagree with you. Isn't he a Mormon?” I said, certainly he was, and then she railed about how only a Christian could have the necessary morality to be President.

Well, first of all, being non-Christian myself, that comment was exactly not the sort of thing that I could accept, and I told her so, adding that the writers of our Constitution were smart enough to put into Article VI the prohibition against any religious test for any public office under the Constitution. As I put it to her, “I don't care whether a Presidential candidate is a Moslem, a Hindu, or even an atheist: and we have a Constitution that says the same thing.” She kept insisting, and I pointed out that probably the most convinced Christian we ever had in the Presidency was Jimmy Carter, but he was not a very competent President. (And at this time, the student commented that Obama was in some ways like Carter, someone who seemed like a nice person, but unable to handle the Presidency.)

Actually, of course, as far as I am concerned, Mormons are Christians: the name of their church is the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” and any church that claims to follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and calls him the Christ is, according to my definition, Christian. I have seen too many cases of Protestants and Catholics each denying the other the right to the term “Christian” to say that anyone who claims to be a Christian has to be accepted on his word as one, despite the claims of any other Christian that he is not. But, as it was clear that this woman had her own ideas as to what constitutes a Christian, there was no sense arguing that point with her.

Another one bites the dust

Well, now Herman Cain has withdrawn from the race for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. Whether the allegations of sexual harassment lodged against Cain are true or not, enough people will believe him that it is clear his presidential hopes have been shot down. And though some sites say that Cain will endorse Newt Gingrich, the person most helped, of course, is Mitt Romney.

The more conservative elements in the GOP seem to be trying to find someone they like better than Romney. And then one after another either gives up, or botches things so badly that nobody can picture them in the Presidency. It is clear that whatever Romney's flaws (and I admit he has some; I would perhaps have preferred Chris Christie, but he doesn't want to run!) he is the best hope of the Republican Party. And does anyone think that those right-wingers would, faced with a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, vote for anyone but Romney?

Let's face it. Mitt Romney will be the nominee. And those who are trying to push anyone else, deal with it.

A blog post that surprised me

We are familiar with the Obama administration's push to raise taxes on “the wealthy,” and specifically his insistence on repealing some of the income tax cuts instituted in George W. Bush's Presidency. So I was surprised, in the process of looking at other blogs this morning and following links from blog to blog, to find a blog called “SayAnythingBlog.com,” on which a posting, by Rob Port, appeared today called “Social Security And Medicare Doing More To Promote Income Inequality Than The Bush Tax Cuts.” In it I read that:

…House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has [made the case that the Republican proposals would better address income inequality than the Democrats'].

Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.

Many may find the results of the CBO study surprising. It turns out, Ryan reports, that federal income taxes (including the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit) actually decreased income inequality slightly between 1979 and 2007, while the federal payroll taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare slightly increased income inequality. That’s despite the fact that income tax rates are lower than in 1979 and payroll taxes higher.

Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That’s because, in Ryan’s words, “the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers.”

In fact, the blog post summarizes this effect:

In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don’t pay income taxes but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.

Interesting. Now I am one of those “old people,” receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits, though I am hardly affluent. (The Clinton presidency impoverished me — he canceled the Strategic Defense Initiative, alias “Star Wars,” which funded the job I was working at in 1994; from 1994 to 1998 I was unemployed, unable to get a job, and since then I've never had the kind of good jobs I'd had in the years prior to 1994, though I've managed to get out of total poverty into a more “normal” existence.) But I imagine there are “affluent” Social Security and Medicare benefit recipients, so I cannot argue with Port's posting. Do you think anyone can enlighten those Democrats who insist that “the ‘Bush tax cuts’ must go”?

A continuation of yesterday's post

Yesterday I made a post that left out one point that I meant to make, but forgot when I entered it into the system.

Certainly one person who has been given license to do “Christian things” is S. Truett Cathy. To those who do not know the name, he is the founder, and still in charge, of Chick-fil-A restaurants. He has steadfastly maintained a policy that not only the locations he owns, but all his franchisees, close on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. His company's web site says it is because “He believes that all franchised Chick-fil-A Operators and their Restaurant employees should have an opportunity to rest, spend time with family and friends, and worship if they choose to do so.” But what if one of his franchisees is Jewish, and worships on Saturday? Mr. Cathy does not contemplate this.

Since Mr. Cathy is a private citizen, of course, he has every right to impose such a condition on his franchisees. And I, in turn, have every right to personally boycott Chick-fil-A. As I do.

What threat?

My blog, for some reason, gets very few comments posted, though I certainly would be happy to see more of my readers comment on my posts. One person who has commented in the past uses the pseudonym Asclepius, and he recently posted a comment on my recent post on separation of “church and state.” You can read his entire comment, but the most important point I think to consider in his comment was the following:

So your experience justifies what most Christians would contend: there should be no compulsion to participate in x, y, or z; but at the same time, that acknowledgment should not serve as a threat to those who do wish, in some way, to participate in Christian things, public or otherwise.

I wrote a reply to his comment, but I thought it really ought to be expanded upon, and this post is intended as a follow-up to my reply to Asclepius' comment as well as an extension of the ideas I expressed in my original posting.

I would not challenge Asclepius' statement that “there should be no compulsion to participate in x, y, or z; but at the same time, that acknowledgment should not serve as a threat to those who do wish, in some way, to participate in Christian things,” but I do not see where any such threat exists. In fact, if anything, “those who do wish… to participate in Christian things” are granted more license than necessary. Many public ceremonies begin with an invocation, generally given by a Christian clergyman. Our coinage and currency bears the motto “In God we trust,” which I as a Jew find acceptable, but which offends my atheistic friends. Back when I was in grade school, they added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance; again, I as a Jew have no problem with these words, but my atheistic friends have different thoughts on the matter. We have elected a black President, but we have never elected a Jewish (or Muslim, Hindu, or atheist) President.

Whenever a court has blocked “participat[ion] in Christian things” it has been because these “Christian things” would involve non-Christians as well, and would involve “compulsion to participate in x, y, or z,” which Asclepius admits is undesirable. School prayer, for example, has been abolished, a good thing because even if some students were able to opt out, the peer pressure against “being different” is great in school-age children. Sitting down when everyone in class is standing up (or leaving the room) calls uninvited attention to the child, and this alone serves as “compulsion to participate in x, y, or z.”

So I wonder what Asclepius really meant by his comment. Perhaps he sees some of these things differently from me, but I'd love to see where.