Odds and Ends

Newt is the next not-Romney, but his experience and the seeming belief that all his dirty laundry has already aired might mean he has staying power. Not an endorsement, just an observation. Two things I like about the new Newt, and we'll see how long it lasts, are his frequent comments that any of the GOP candidates would make a better President than Obama and his intelligence over the illegal immigration question. I was starting to resign myself to Romney, not liking Newt's checkered past, but who knows, Americans are forgiving if somebody looks repentant enough and the sin was long ago enough.

Speaking of which I am waiting for any conservative to rebut my comments from an earlier post:

Do conservatives really want a government powerful enough to round up 11 million people for deportation? Do we really want the federal government getting practice at interning that many people?

Or rebut my contention that Gonzales vs Raich was wrongly decided and helps the constitutional case for Obamacare.

Even Vladimir Putin can't stuff enough ballot boxes to totally control an election. Gives me hope for beating Obama in 2012.

The slow motion collapse of the euro continues. The situation is pretty simple, despite claims of complexity to the contrary. The standard way out for governments that have spent and promised too much is to debase their currency through inflation. Since all of the offending countries are in the euro, only two solutions remain. Italy, Portugal and Greece and others leave the euro, or the European Central Bank prints euros, which screws the Germans, and to a lesser extent the French. Count on the Germans to elect a government that leaves the euro if they start to suffer inflation. Either way, the euro is toast, no matter what European politicians say. Count on fools at the fed and in the administration to think they can help with a bailout through the IMF. (Treasury spokesman denies this, so we know it must be true.) To coin a phrase, "There's not enough swag in China to bail out all the fools."

Covert action against Iran's nuclear program suggests CIA or Israeli involvement. I should hope so. Do we really want a war? People who rail against covert action always act like its evil. But is a nuclear-armed Iran preferable, especially given the crazy Mahdists that run the place? As an aside, it seems obvious that the Stuxnet virus was an example of state-sponsored cyber-warfare against Iran. But we better get our game up, the mere fact that Stuxnet showed it was possible to infect stand alone industrial control systems means that others will try.

Overall, I am pretty up beat. I think that the eventual Republican nominee can beat Obama. He or she doesn't have to be perfect, just tested in the fire of the campaign.