For the liberal reader, I understand you'll never like Newt; but for the Right-of-Center visitor to this site, all I am saying...is give Newt a chance. Listen to what he has to say. Visit his site. (His many sites). Investigate what he's been up to the past 6 years. Think of what this man could do to Barack Obama in a debate on national television!

Here's a little taste of the clarity and wisdom of Gingrich:

In the end, it's only a beginning. The far-reaching new banking and consumer protection bill that President Barack Obama intends to sign on Wednesday now shifts from the politicians to the technocrats.

The legislation gives regulators latitude and time to come up with new rules, requires scores of studies and, in some instances, depends on international agreements falling into place.

For Wall Street, the next phase represents continuing uncertainty. It also offers banks and other financial institutions yet another opportunity to influence and shape the rules that govern their businesses.

Perfect.  This plan sounds flawless...except for the fact that the full plan is not known, even by those who created it.

Last week the controlling political party in the United States passed another 2,000 page bill that few have read and even fewer comprehend.  It is a monstrosity, just like the health care bill before it (and like the cap-and-trade bill looming before November's mid-term elections).

Notice how many times in this Yahoo News article references are made to plans, agencies, bureaucracies, etc.  F.A. Hayek called this obsession with micro-managing un-manageable facets of society, government, and the economy is the Left's "fatal conceit."  They insist on dis-regarding a century's worth of evidence that the top-down controlled state always fails (and fails big).

It reminds me of something a wise (and dastardly) man named Screwtape once said

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Commenting on the bizarre presidential command, Krauthammer states:

Apart from the psychobabble — farcically turning a space-faring enterprise into a self-esteem enhancer — what’s the sentiment behind this charge? Sure, America has put a man on the moon, led the information revolution, and won far more Nobel Prizes than any other nation — but, on the other hand, a thousand years ago al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra.

Bolden seems quite intent on driving home this message of achievement equivalence — lauding, for example, Russia’s contributions to the space station. Russia? In the 1990s, the Russian space program fell apart, leaving the United States to pick up the slack and the tab for the missing Russian contributions to get the space station built.

For good measure, Bolden added that the U.S. cannot get to Mars without international assistance. Beside the fact that this is not true, contrast this with the elan and self-confidence of President Kennedy’s pledge that America would land on the moon within a decade.

He continues:

There was no finer expression of belief in American exceptionalism than Kennedy’s. Obama has a different take. As he said last year in Strasbourg, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Which of course means: If we’re all exceptional, no one is.

Exactly, Chuck!  If we can't acknowledge that the United States of America is the the freest, most prosperous, liberty-promoting civilization in human history, then what's the point in working to make a better life, country, or world?  If we can't end up better off than we were, if all we can hope for is mediocrity, then what's the point?

And yet this same cautious attitude towards American greatness is nowhere to be found when President Obama is speaking of himself or his administration.

It’s fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one’s country. But Obama’s modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply.

It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign, from the still inexplicable mass rally in Berlin in front of a Prussian victory column to the Greek columns framing him at the Democratic convention. And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America’s sins and the world’s to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the first-person pronoun “I.”

Notice, too, how Obama habitually refers to cabinet members and other high-level government officials as “my” — “my secretary of homeland security,” “my national security team,” “my ambassador.” The more normal — and respectful — usage is to say “the,” as in “the secretary of state.” These are, after all, public officials sworn to serve the nation and protect the Constitution — not just the man who appointed them.  It’s a stylistic detail, but quite revealing of Obama’s exalted view of himself. Not surprising, perhaps, in a man whose major achievement before acceding to the presidency was writing two biographies — both about himself.

Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama’s modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. But it is odd to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence — yet not of his own country’s.

Perhaps these are all subtle points, but the devil is in the details.  One would assume that your reason for wanting to be the president of the United States included a deep, passionate love and appreciation for the land that had blessed your life to the point where you were asked to lead it.  I don't hear that from this commander-in-chief.  I hear a lot of blame and hand-wringing and promises that our new leaders will right the wrongs of the past with a wave of their bureaucratic wands.

But that is not the real problem with this appointment, and more specifically, this appointee.  Dr. Berwick, when it comes to health care, is a socialist.  He is in favor of the "single-payer" system practiced in most European countries; the same one President Obama advocated for his entire adult life.  Here Berwick is in his own words:

Why does this matter, you ask?

All I want you to get out of this story is this: the president has been lying about his deeply-held, far-Left views.  He ran as a middle-of-the-road, moderate candidate who would bring races, colors, creeds, and ideologies together.  He promised to run the "most transparent" administration in history.  People voted for him because of these disingenuous promises of unity and transparency.  When it came to health care debates in 2009, President Obama said he was not in favor of a single-payer, European-style system.  He said anyone who claimed this was a fear-monger.  And now, when it comes down to it, he puts a socialist in charge of our government's health care bureaucracy.

Please understand that this matters.  Please understand that elections have consequences.  Please understand that by sitting on the sidelines, we have given the control of our nation over to radicals.

I don't agree with a single word Dr. Berwick says about health care and the redistribution of wealth.  Sadly, our president does.

In his most recent column, Dr. Sowell discusses the Republican party's frustrating insistence upon falling for the same promise from Democrats that they will cut spending if the GOP will go along with higher taxes.

People who remember the old comic strip “Peanuts” will recall an often-repeated situation where Lucy offers to hold a football for Charlie Brown to kick. Then, as Charlie comes running up to kick it, Lucy snatches away the ball, and Charlie Brown loses his balance and goes crashing on his backside.

The reason this same scene remained funny, despite how often it was repeated, is that in the later repetitions Charlie Brown would express suspicion at Lucy, recalling how she had tricked him before. She would then come up with some claim that she wasn’t going to do that anymore — and of course she did.

There is a similar routine that has been repeated many times in Washington over the years, with the Democrats playing Lucy and Republicans playing Charlie Brown.

It goes like this: Democrats start spending money wildly, handing out goodies to a wide range of people whom they want to vote for them, while Republicans complain about deficits and the national debt. Then, when the public becomes alarmed about the debts that are piling up, the Democrats get the Republicans to vote for higher taxes to deal with the debt crisis, in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

Sometimes the deal is sweetened by the Democrats’ promising to make spending cuts if the Republicans vote for higher taxes, so that there can be one of those “bipartisan” solutions so beloved by the media. But, after the Republicans vote for the tax increases and come running up to find the spending cuts, the Democrats snatch away the spending cuts and the Republicans fall right on their backsides, just like Charlie Brown.

But we must not fall prey to the tempting position of only blaming our politicians.  "We the people" put those politicians in place, and continue to vote for them even after they've proven to be wholly untrustworthy and/or incompetent.

Republicans are not the only suckers in this game. The voting public’s willingness to believe fancy rhetoric and ignore hard facts is a crucial part of this scam.

When the Obama administration said that it could provide health insurance to millions of additional people without increasing the national debt, shouldn’t common sense have told you that somebody was insulting your intelligence?

When the 2,000-page bill was rushed through Congress too fast for anybody to read it, shouldn’t that have made you realize that you were being played for a sucker?

When this bill, which was passed with lightning speed, was scheduled to take effect only after the 2012 election, didn’t that suggest that they didn’t want you to find out how it would work in practice in time to turn against Obama when he came up for reelection?

Stop the madness by equipping yourself with information, facts, and a passion for being the best citizen-activist you can be.  Please.

For a small glimpse of what a candid, honest, and un-compromising Republican actually looks (and sounds) like, PLEASE watch this:

Preach it, brother!

I love how the first lady who complained said that, in her mind, she wasn't making enough money...and when reminded by Gov. Christie that, like the rest of society, she "didn't have to" pick the line of work she was in, suddenly remembered that she (and all teachers) only do their jobs because they want to and they love it.

Oh, and by the way, that woman's name is Rita Wilson, and she works in the Rutherford School District...and makes $86,000 per year.

The point here is not that teachers aren't as valuable to society as say a professional baseball player, but simply that the state (and federal government) is not an endless supply of funds as the governor pointed out.  You can't run a budget based on emotional outbursts form angry women in a townhall meeting.  School choice, something I would have thought open-minded liberals would love, is the best alternative for well-qualified, hard-working teachers, as I'm sure Ms. Wilson is.  I WANT good teachers to be rewarded, but when the unions (who are also the single biggest contributors to the political campaigns of Democrats) rule a state like they do in New Jersey, California or Illinois, we're forced as a society to pay the horrendous ones more and more as well.  This is unsustainable.

Everyone loses when there is no competition and people are guaranteed jobs for life.

The American public feels it is drowning in red ink. It is dismayed and even outraged at the burgeoning national deficits, unbalanced state and local budgets, and accounting that often masks the extent of indebtedness. There is a mounting sense that taxpayers are being taken for an expensive ride by public sector unions. The extraordinary benefits the unions have secured for their members are going to be harder and harder to pay.

Mort Zuckerman is the Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report, and was an initial supporter of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2009. But lately, Mr. Zuckerman has changed his tune as he (and America) has watched the president, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid throw economic caution and fiscal responsibility to the wind.

In his latest column, Zuckerman makes the critically important point that there is rampant and nefarious collusion between the public employee unions and the politicians they work tirelessly to elect.

The business community and a growing portion of the public now understand the dynamics that discriminate against the private sector. The public sector unions organize voting campaigns for politicians who, on election, repay their benefactors by approving salaries and benefits for the public sector, irrespective of whether they are sustainable. And what is happening with California is happening in slower motion in the rest of the country. It must be one of the reasons the Pew Research Center this year reported that support for labor unions generally has plummeted "amid growing public skepticism about unions' power and purpose."

There has been a transformation in the nature of our employment. Labor is no longer dominated by private sector industrial workers who were in large part culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. Over recent decades public sector employment has exploded and public workers have come to dominate the labor movement. These public sector employees have a unique and powerful advantage in contract negotiations. Quite simply it is their capacity to deliver political endorsements and votes for the very people who are theoretically on the other side of the negotiating table. Candidates who want to appear tough on crime will look to cops, sheriffs' deputies, prison guards, and highway patrol officers for their endorsement.

The point here isn't to pile blame on every union and every member of those unions. But to deny that there is a conflict of interest for the politician who marries his or her campaign to the same union workers that are being paid (exorbitantly) with the tax dollars that this same politician will have some control over.

City government was developed to serve its citizens. Today the citizenry is working in large part to serve the government. It is always hard to shrink government spending. It is particularly difficult when public sector unions have such a unique lever of pressure.

We have to escape this cycle or it will crush us. One way is to take labor negotiations out of the hands of vulnerable legislators and assign them to independent commissions. They would have a better shot at achieving a fair balance between appropriate salary increases and the revenues and services of local municipalities. The electorate won't swallow any more red ink.

Free markets aren't perfect, but state-controlled economies, the kind we're seeing implode in Greece, always lead to societal collapse.

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville

The network was, of course, "surprised" by the fact that there are a handful of black Americans running for elected federal office as Republicans.  And what is worse: they're partnering with Tea Party groups in their respective areas!  Gasp!

My beef is not with MSNBC having an opinion on the situation they're reporting on here.  It's that absolutely no credit will be given to conservatives or Republicans for attracting ethnically diverse candidates.

And speaking of the tragic mis-placed loyalty blacks have had to the Democrat Party, here's an excerpt from Dr. Walter E. Williams' latest column on that very subject:

Tragically, most Americans, including black people whose ancestors have suffered from gross injustices of slavery, think it quite proper for government to forcibly use one person to serve the purposes of another. That's precisely what income redistribution is: the practice of forcibly taking the fruits of one person's labor for the benefit of another. That's also what theft is and the practice differs from slavery only in degree but not kind.

What about blacks who cherish liberty and limited government and joined in the tea party movement, or blacks who are members of organizations such as the Lincoln Institute, Frederick Douglass Foundation and Project 21? They've been maligned as Oreos, Uncle Toms and traitors to their race. To make such a charge borders on stupidity, possibly racism. After all, when President Reagan disagreed with Tip O'Neill, did either charge the other with being a traitor to his race? Then why is it deemed traitorous when one black disagrees with another, unless you think that all blacks must think alike?

I hope it's misunderstanding, rather than contempt, that explains black hostility toward the principles of liberty.

Here's Part 1, but do yourself a huge favor and check out all 5.

If you've yet to read Steyn's tour-de-force, America Alone, throw away whatever book is setting on your nightstand and buy this thing.

Please.