The Case for Newt

Professor Jacobson makes the case for why Newt Gingrich should be the Republican nominee for President. I'm begining to lean in that direction myself. I'm definitely not a Romney fan. I just don't trust him. I like Rick Perry alot but he just hasn't been very impressive in the debates ( I recognize that the format is terribly flawed) and I like Hermann Cain alot too but he appears to have very superficial command of some of the most important issues, such as foreign policy. This piece in The American Spectator is also very convincing.

I credit Newt Gingrich, not Bill Clinton, with balancing the federal budget back in the late 90's. Presidents seem to take the credit, or the blame, for budgets, mainly because they ultimately sign them into law, but it is important to remember that all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives and it was the first Republican majority in 40 years that passed the first balanced budget in decades.

Newt gets the credit in my mind for passing that balanced budget and I am willing to bet that as President he can prevail upon the Congress to do it again.

Mark Steyn - Corporate Collaborators

Mark Steyn writes at National Review about corproate collaboration with the Occupy Wall Street movement (is that like a bowel movement?) as "in the Nazi-occupied-France sense: The city’s feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures."

It's all good but here is what it boils down to:

At heart, Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the “idealism” that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge — at least until the window-smashing starts. To “occupy” Oakland or anywhere else, you have to have something to put in there. Yet the most striking feature of OWS is its hollowness. And in a strange way the emptiness of its threats may be a more telling indictment of a fin de civilisation West than a more coherent protest movement could ever have mounted.

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DEX Knows Nothing

The other day yet another Yellow Pages directory landed on my driveway (there seem to be several). Having absolutely no use for this dead tree directory due to this wonderful invention called "The Internet" it followed a long line of others straight into the trash. So, it didn't provide me a convenience, it just made work for me. 

Five minutes ago the phone rang. It was a robocall from DEX asking whether I'd gotten their stupid, obsolete book. Press 1 for yes, 9 for no. I suspect if I'd been silly enough to press 9 they'd have promptly sent another one out. There was no option for "Please stop sending me these bloody things! I don't want them."

Does anyone still use the Yellow Pages anymore? If you are a business that does, you may be wasting your advertising budget becasue I  certainly don't use it and don't know anyone that does. I don't look at the Yellow Pages as a convenience, just a waste disposal issue.

/irritable rant.

Andrew Klavan on What Leftism Does to People

Over at PJ Media, Andrew Klavan explains how leftist ideology inevitably makes people awful:

Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.

This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves.

Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil?Leftists call conservatives hateful…

Read the whole thing.

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